#thompson motif index of folk literature

[theres-a-motif-for-that]

in this house we love and respect all clones

[encantada29]

(via G. Ogres)

[thearcanecat]

Hatchetfield headcanons?

Let’s see…

Holloway has lots of scars from living for centuries and hides them with the jacket. These include:

Lightning scars

Wiggly: sucker/tentacle marks

Pokey: cracks

Blinky: eye like circular pattern. Red vein squiggles at end.

Tinky: hoof print

Nibbly: bite marks

Her accent gets stronger when she’s mad. Same for Duke, but you rarely hear it.

Original name was Holly-May Logan.

The strange carving it’s mentioned she has in Killer Track, is a part of Pokey’s mask.

Ryan Reynolds is the person running against Solomon for mayor. He’s pushing the problematic pooch story because it shows how horrible the town has gotten under Solomon’s rule. You’d think the disappearance of his wife right before he got elected would be a bigger deal, but no, time for our daily Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel segment!

The Obnoxious Teen is actually different versions of Pete after an encounter with the Bastard Box. He now lives in a never ending hell of minimum wage jobs.

Grace’s birthday is September 9th, buy a priest a beer day.

The Honey Queen sacrifice takes place on the summer solstice at midnight.

Description of the tree that grew from Willabella: Gnarled roots extend from a bulbous center. No leaves hang from its crown of branches. It is not natural. Nothing grows near it, except the apples that grow for its branches, never ripe and always rotten. A hollow in the center is swarming with spiders whose web spans across it. Several scars are evident from where the Hatchetmen, once they realized their mistake, tried to cut it down. From its branches hand charms of protection and containment that replace old ones of worship. It grows behind the old Waylon Hall, over the sight of Willabella’s execution. Like the Hall, many rumors swirl around it and foolish children often dare each other to touch the bark.

The Blade of Truth that MacNamara uses on the Sniggles is one of multiple PEIP has constructed. With help from Holloway, they were able to harness the White’s energy into physical form. Each Blade requires a secret to be whispered into it as it forms, one no one has ever heard before. If someone tells a lie while holding the Blade, it shatters.

The Foster family are descended from Willabella and a Hatchetman with the last name Forester. Willabella had no love for him and only got pregnant to delay her execution.

The Stockworth family vacations in Hatchetfield because they have connections with the Church of the Starry children. Lucy is not aware if this.

Charles Coven was part of PEIP and went by Carlo at the time.

PEIP has ID numbers based on the Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk-Literature. Basically a collection of a bunch of different motifs in folklore.

Wilbur: D1310.10.1. Magic apple gives supernatural knowledge.

Holloway (Holliway this identity): G220.0.1. "Black" and "white" witches. Malevolent and benevolent.

John: B147.2.1.2. Eagle as omen of victory.

Xander: J1291.2. Theological questions answered by propounding simple questions in science.

Douglas Keane Sr. was an informant for PEIP. Basically, PEIP goes around to various people in professions where the supernatural may be encountered (law enforcement, medical, park rangers etc.) and gives them a little presentation with very vague language about if they seen anything unnatural, or out if the ordinary, to give their office a call. Since Hatchetfield is such a hotspot, Douglas knows a lot more about the supernatural than most informants do and is on first name basis with several PEIP agents. (This is heavily based off a book called The Rook by Daniel O’Malley.)

[laciere]

A narrative needs two things to be a gothic romance. First, "woman plus habitation." "Horror," film theorist Mary Ann Doane writes, "which should by rights be external to domesticity, infiltrates the home." The house is not essential for domestic abuse, but hell, it helps: a private space where private dramas are enacted behind, as the cliche goes, closed doors; but also windows sealed against the sound, drawn curtains, silent phones. A house is never apolitical. it is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears. Windex is political. So is the incense you burn to hide the smell of sex, or a fight. The second necessary element: "marrying a stranger." Strangers, feminist film theorist Diane Waldman points out, because during the 1940s--the heyday of gothic romance films like Rebecca and Dragonwyck and Suspicion--men were returning from war, no longer familiar to the people they'd left behind. "The rash of hasty pre-war marriages (and the subsequent all-time high divorce rate of 1946), the increase in early marriages in the 40s," Waldman writes, "and the process of wartime separation and reunion [gave the] motif of the Gothics a specific historical resonance." "The gothic heroine," film scholar Tania Modleski says, "tries to convince herself that her suspicions are unfounded, that, since she loves him, he must be trustworthy and that she will have failed as a woman if she does not implicitly believe in him." There is of course a major problem with the gothic: it is by nature heteronormative. A notable exception is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, with its powerful queer undertones between the innocent protagonist and the sinister, titular vampire. ("You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish," Carmilla tells Laura. "How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.") We were not married; she was not a dark and brooding man. It was hardly a crumbling ancestral manor; just a single-family home, built at the beginning of the Great Depression. No moors, just a golf course. But it was a "woman plus habitation" and she was a stranger. That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we'd only met with chaperones before marriage; rahter because i didn't know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood--a flood of what i realized I did not know.(19) Afterward, I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together. (19). Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-literature, Type T11, Falling in love with a person never seen.

“Dream House as American Gothic”, In The Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado (2019, Gray Wolf Press)

[fullbattleregalia]

Google: Okay, so you’ve now searched slang terms for various poker hands, Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature, and “revolver gun types.”

Me: Yup. You forgot me looking up the canon heights of a bunch of different RWBY characters.

Google: …should I be concerned?

Me: No, no - I just want my fanfic about this fantasy world full of reality bending superpowers to be as accurate as possible and contain all the neurotically obscure references I can possibly squeeze in.

[broadcast-spectrum]

another useful link: this search engine for the thompson motif-index of folk literature. lets you look up tropes commonly found in fairy tales, myths, and other folkloric-type stories

[what-even-is-thiss]

Hi there! I was just wondering, since you seem to know a lot about mythology and folklore, if you had any way to access the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index online? Thanks a bunch!

[doublearmbars]

From now on wrestling storylines must fit into the Thompson Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Someone’s gonna have to pony up and become an animal bride.

[rodeodeparis]

another rambling tachioda analysis i impulsively wrote where i compare it to folk tales and talk about story structure. whoopee

so i’ve been working with the aarne-thompson-uther index lately. the atu is like tvtropes for folktales. it has two categorizations: one is for motifs, or common themes that can be found in folk tales. (ie wicked stepmother, shoe that only fits the true love, etc.) the other is for story types, which is common ways in which these motifs can be glued together. (cinderella is wicked stepmother + shoe that fits the true love, plus a bunch of other things.) 

while browsing, this particular tale-type caught my eye:

lenore, the namesake for the type, is a ballad by german author gottfried august burger. inspired by the european renditions of this myth, it follows the tale type description to the letter. however, it includes an additional section where the human curses god for killing her lover, and is punished by the dead because of it. the deacon of myrka, an icelandic rendition, follows this as well to an extent, but keeps the human alive at the end and curses her with a haunting. in general, both involve a bare-bones 365 with different christian and local twists. 

my first thought when i saw this was “tachioda”. probably just my fixation talking, but i recognized the story. not just in tachioda, and not in the way the description put it. 

in a section below descriptions of types, it lists countries where the author found indications of this tale (with sources). i’ll save you the long list - it’s disproportionately european. despite recent efforts to internationalize it, the atu is still very euro-centric. (why go through the trouble of adding “walloon” as a distinct ethnic renderer of a story while you just put “iraq” or “morocco” to refer to those regions?) hence the “generic” description being of one of the tale’s most popular european forms. what’s more important here is the premise. so, when i saw a japanese version was listed, my suspicion was confirmed.

i think what i may have recognized was the peony lantern* (starts page 5), a famous “ghost story” in japan. i can’t find the book the atu lists as a source for the story having a japanese rendition so i don’t know this for sure.

the peony lantern is a literary adaption of a folk tale, written in 1666 by author ryoi asai. the original was a chinese story of the same name* from jiandeng xinhua ( something like ”new stories to tell after snuffing out the lamp”), a famous compilation of adapted folk tales by ming-era novelist you qu that’d come out some 300 years earlier. this makes asai’s peony lantern an adaption of an adaption of a story that’d probably been passed on and changed long before qu was born.

(*for the former - asai’s version is the first in japanese, but not the most popular - the plot summary goes from page 5-6. most of what you can find online is a translation of another, more popular japanese adaption that came after asai but added some things.

for the latter, yes, that was the only english translation i could find. they tend to be sparse for chinese literature unfortunately.)

the peony lantern - both qu’s and asai’s versions - is the same idea as 365, but with flipped genders. here’s a very very basic summary of both of them:

man finds ghost woman during festival. (lantern festival in qu’s, obon in asai’s.) she’s with her maid, who’s holding a peony lantern,

man falls in love with the woman ghost, and she tells him about her past, 

discovered by neighbor peeping into his house, who suggests he travel to the village the woman was from for help,

he does, and discovers a coffin in her old house with an inscription that confirms the ghost’s identity. he then goes to get religious help (from a taoist disciple in qu’s, buddhist priest in asai’s),

despite having gotten help, the man is drunkenly lured to his death,

qu’s man is drunk after a friend’s banquet and wanders inside the temple he was staying at. he’s lured by the ghost inside and into a coffin.

asai’s man is called by the ghost from outside of his house. he drunkenly wanders with her into the temple.

people spot the man, now as a ghost, walking around with the woman ghost,

townspeople (qu) or the man’s family (asai) go to a (taoist in qu’s, buddhist in asai’s) priest (and in qu’s only, disciple) for help,

the priest banishes the ghosts,

in qu’s version only, the townspeople go to thank the priest and disciple who helped them, but find that the priest has disappeared, and the disciple is now mute.

don’t worry about the surface-level details not matching up to lenore or to each other. for example, i’m pretty sure that the horse is a european thing. the folk tale of oisin on tir an nog and the tale of urashima taro are listed under the same type - 470b - with the circumstances of how they happened as local flair. oisin’s stepping off the horse serves the same purpose as the box urashima receives. what matters here is the themes and main events, and those track.

lenore could have very well ended in the same way as the peony lantern - the human and ghost are spotted, and a christian priest banishes them - but it doesn’t. that’s because of a very important difference in the way these stories are set up.

if you know the difference between european five-act structure and east asian four-act structure, skip to the paragraph starting with “if the peony lantern followed”.

european five-act structure goes like this: 

exposition - characters, setting, and conflict are set up.

bob needs to open the bottle of olive oil to make dinner. the cap is tight.

rising action(s) - conflict ramps up.

bob struggles to open the tight cap. he tries everything, but it doesn’t work.

climax - conflict comes to its highest point.

in frustration, he digs under the cap with a knife, and it flings open.

falling action(s) - conflict de-escelates and starts to wrap up.

bob closes the bottle and pours the olive oil in the pan.

resolution - conflict is resolved.

bob continues making dinner.

east asian four-act structure* differs by country, but the gist of it goes like this: 

introduction - characters, setting, and pretense are set up.

bob is making dinner. he’s struggling to open an olive oil bottle with a tight cap.

development - situation is developed. 

in frustration, he digs under the cap with a knife and it flings open. he pours oil in a pan.

pivot - story changes direction/introduces a new perspective.

alice comes to stand behind him. she sounds angry. 

conclusion - story ends. 

bob turns around and discovers that alice’s eye is swollen and red - the cap had flung into it. bob profusely apologizes while he cooks.

(*ctrl+f “east asian 4 act”.)

disclaimers:

4-act isn’t the only one used in east asia, and 5-act isn’t the only one used in europe

i’m not saying you can’t appreciate these if you didn’t grow up with them or something like that

these aren’t the end-all-be-all of story structures in general, but it’s easier explaining two than several. also, these ones are pretty big.

in a five-act structure, the protagonist affects the world around them. because of this, they need a problem - a conflict - to take care of. it’s probably best to think about conflict here more like “goal” or “motivation” - a character needs to want something, and that thing comes in conflict with something else. this isn’t always a character explicitly going after something or being pitted against an enemy - it can be internal as well. their goal/motivation needs to be at the center of the story.

five-act stories start with a character’s goal being solidified to the audience. after this, they can either do something about it, or something can happen to them which furthers complications. either way, they need “motivation” to keep going. if an antagonist is present, whether or not they’re out to get the protagonist doesn’t matter - the protagonist will end up confronting them since they’re in the way of their goal. in the end, a goal needs to be met or not met, antagonist defeated or not defeated. whatever won out in the end is the determiner of the theme the story’s ended on. this is why the ending is the “resolution.” 

in a four-act structure, a character is affected by the world around them. the character can have a conflict and goals, but they need causality - significant events to happen to them - to move forward. the story is driven by how events take shape and how they compare to each other in the grand scheme of things. from there, a character’s reaction (or lack of a reaction) continues the chain of events while telling us what we need to know about them.

four-act stories start by something happening to the protagonist or the protagonist doing something that makes the story-starter happen. the story continues as the protagonist keeps reacting. what keeps them going is some sort of mental/emotional relation to the events at hand. if there’s an antagonist, it’s their goals that are propelling the story, as those goals inhibit the protagonist/their world in some way. when the protagonist seeks a fight, it’s related to the sequence of events - if they’re a goody two-shoes, for example, it’s when the antagonist’s violence goes too far. events lead to an ending that, no matter what it is, reflects the theme of the story. this is why the ending is the “conclusion”.

in the five-act example, the point of the story is bob opening the cap. in the four-act example, his opening the cap was a goal of his, but the point was that he wasn’t careful and hit alice in the eye. you can change the structure of these stories around to make one fit the other, but the focuses work because they’re tailored to those structures.

there’s philosophical/cultural/historical “backstories” as to why the four and five-act structures are the way they are that i don’t feel like i can articulate very well. they’re also a lot for a post about video game men. if there’s something i’m missing or not getting, please tell me. i’ll try my best otherwise.

if the peony lantern followed a five-act structure, i think it would go something like this:

introduction: man meets woman ghost at festival. 

rising action: he falls in love with her. neighbor sees him and tells him this is dangerous. he goes to get help in her village. he discovers a tomb in her house with her name on it.

climax: he discovers a coffin in her house with her name on it.

falling action: although he got help, he’s drunkenly lured to his death.

resolution: his body is found and he’s buried. the ghost couple haunts the town. the townspeople/family ask for help, and the ghosts are banished.

feels weird, right? the peony lantern isn’t actually following a five-act structure. instead, it goes like this:

introduction: man meets woman ghost at festival. he falls in love with her. neighbor sees him and tells him this is dangerous. 

development: he goes to the town where she’s from and discovers a tomb in her house with her name on it. he then goes to get religious help. even though got help, he’s drunkenly lured to his death. 

pivot: the ghost couple haunts the town.

conclusion: the townspeople/family ask for help. the ghosts are banished.

four-act structure hinges on significant events to develop the situation, which leads to character development. we see this in two different ways - during the man’s life and after - because of the way four-act structure is set up to think about ideas: idea (thesis), opposition (antithesis), combination (synthesis). that’s why the “pivot” is the story giving him what he wants; the effect the man’s uniting with his love had on his fellow townspeople as they prowled the streets was not something he seemed to care about much. there’s no way he couldn’t have cared when he was banished. no matter how strong their love was, the story claims that there were more important things for him to consider.

compare this to lenore. if lenore followed a four-act structure, i think it’d go something like this:

introduction: human has a good relationship with her boyfriend. however, he dies. she is grief-stricken, and in mourning. her mourning is slowly escalating.

development: her mourning escalates to a point where she curses god at her loss.

pivot: later, his ghost shows up to her house, riding on a horse.

conclusion: ecstatic, she goes with him. she rides with him to the graveyard. she realizes he is really dead. she dies herself. 

feels weird, right? lenore isn’t actually following a four-act structure. instead, it goes like this:

introduction: human’s boyfriend is dead. she’s grief-stricken, and curses god.

rising action: he shows up at her house. she goes with him. he asks her if she’s afraid twice, she says no twice. third time, they’re at the graveyard.

climax: she realizes he’s really dead.

falling action: she’s pulled to her death.

resolution: she’s dead.

like how the four-act structure hinges on character development, the five-act structures hinges on goals to drive a conflict. the five-act structure ideas as thesis vs. antithesis - goal vs. opposition. one has to win at the end, and this tension culminates in the climax. in lenore, the two opposing ideas are her love for the ghost vs. how she blasphemed. first, she blasphemes. then, her ghost lover comes back to take her, and it seems like the love will win out...but she soon faces the consequences of that love when she realizes her love was actually dead. when she dies, the latter triumphed, and her love is shown as not having been worth it. 

so the peony lantern is a story which can only read as harrowing as it does because it’s told in a four-act structure. qu’s and asai’s versions differed quite a bit, though:

ghost appearing during the lantern festival (qu) vs obon (asai)

disciple and priest (qu) vs disciple’s role merged into priest (asai)

man lured to death (qu) vs leaves house on his own volition, then lured to death (asai)

village asking for help (qu) vs human’s family (asai)

taoist priest and disciple (qu) vs buddhist priest (asai)

taoist punishment big part of story (qu) vs buddhist punishment, smaller part (asai)

most of these choices look like localizations. the family instead of the townspeople was probably to make those localizations make more sense. as for the significance of the banishment and the way in which the man was lead to his death, i assume asai changed these because of the specific story he wanted to tell. 

a buddhist priest himself, much of asai’s writing focused on subverting buddhist emphasis on the importance of spiritual matters. a previous book he’d written is named for the term ukiyo (浮世), or “floating world”. this term had started picking up meaning to refer to a contemporaneous emerging culture of boisterous, red light district-prowling city life. this term is homophonous to another term pronounced ukiyo (憂き世), or “this sorrowful world”, a japanese  term for the buddhist concept of escape from earthly death and reincarnation. instead of that, why not hedonistic, earthly pleasures? this was a sentiment which fit into asai’s writing, his time’s relatively stable contemporary politics, and the ukiyo subculture. (also, yes, it’s that ukiyo.) you can read tales from a floating world translated here. 

with that, it’s easy to see the sort of story he was trying to get out of the peony lantern. “floating” suggests that most of his writing is lighthearted, and it certainly is, but much of it ultimately focused on critiquing politics/society at large. (though not always expertly.) he was a particular fan of pointing out to the readers what he felt were injustices or what was right instead. qu’s peony lantern and its warning of not faltering to love was a perfect target for a writer like asai. 

jiandeng xinhua was influential for the novel way in which qu combined folk tales, buddhist lessons, and his political context. despite this, it was banned (and later unbanned) in his home country for political reasons and was more popular in vietnam, korea, and japan. as a consequence, the peony lantern is most well-known in asai’s form, scoring adaptions from further written stories, to kabuki, to tv, to several movies. it’s one of the most popular japanese kaiban and it inspired others like it. why did it last so long?

asai’s story still operates in a the same buddhist framework as qu’s. in both stories, for lack of a better term, the man’s love with someone he shouldn’t have interacted with came back to bite him in the ass. he’s ultimately punished along with his ghost-lover for having faltered to her in the first place.

but qu’s man was coaxed into his coffin. asai’s man chose to leave his house. the buddhist prayer to banish the ghost is one sentence long, as opposed to qu’s detailed taoist banishment. i think the longevity of asai’s peony lantern is because of these changes. it draws attention to the events that got the story to this point and their ambiguity. with this, we’re left with a ghost and the man who loved her. the relationship is even more in focus than it was before. 

the basis of the religious subversion builds a framework for further explorations of the nature of the man and ghost’s relationship - the ghost’s apparent intentions, and the man’s apparent “loss” of agency. subversions never question the danger of the ghost, and don’t go great lengths to change the main course of events or introduce a conflict. they subvert by showing the love inside of that danger, what could’ve happened within, before, after, or outside of it. the change of context changes our perceptions. some adaptions even include the human and ghost being reincarnated together or the human dying with a smile on his face. 

by keeping the actions and changing the context, subversions of the peony lantern are about how much the ghost and human mean to each other. the world around the human faces the consequences of the human’s actions. the drawing, oppositional factor here is the “forbidden love” on the part of the relationship’s existence. the important question is “who are these people, and why do they love each other so much?”

lenore had a level of cultural influence in europe to jiandeng xinhua. it inspired a lot of 18th-19th century romantic and gothic literature, specifically early vampire literature; english author bram stoker mentioned it as an influence on dracula*. the plot of dracula revolves more around the group of men who kill him at the end. dracula stalks, seduces, and eventually feeds on women. when he curses the protagonist’s fiancee, the hunt ramps up, and dracula’s eventually staked through the heart. 

(*it’s a whole book rather than a short story like lenore or the peony lantern, so just read the wikipedia page if you’d like a full summary.)

the ghost in the peony lantern wasn’t this polarizing a figure because stoker wasn’t in the business of subverting in the way asai was. stoker wrote dracula in the fashion of a shitty contemporary trend. vampires have a history in europe of being portrayed through symbols associated with antisemitism against ashkenazi jews that i’d rather not get into. dracula was so evil because he was so cunning and seductive, “luring” you in, a trope which echoed that sort of anti-semitism. dracula’s allure gives the story a conflict in the same way the human cursing god in lenore did. the emphasis of the conflict just changed. 

in lenore, the ghost’s danger was as inherent as in the peony lantern, but the woman’s love - her motivation - was similarly pre-established. what stuck here is the emphasis on that conflict - the question of the human’s priorities between her safety and her love interest’s allure. making the monster appealing in some way complicates things, as it gives her a “rational” reason to be lead to her death. it’s a question of the “benefit” vs. the “cost”. thesis vs. antithesis. 

like in the peony lantern, the ghost’s danger is never questioned, but their intentions are. this is why dracula’s contemporaries in anglophone tv shows, movies, and young adult romance novels fret over their danger as much as their human love interests do. by showing that they don’t want to hurt their human, they’re given goals that “salvage” their dangerous nature. this focus on their “goals” not only paints them as worthy of sympathy, but drives the romance on both sides instead of just one. this portrays the relationship as a matter of mismatched compatibility in the way subversions of the peony lantern do, but the focus of the relationship is on how the individual sides fit together, rather than why they fit together.

by changing the focus of the conflict to highlight motivations, subversions of lenore are about how much this ghost means to the human. the world around the human warns the human about what they’re doing. the drawing, oppositional factor here is in the “forbidden love” on the part of the human’s and ghost’s motivations. the important question is “who is this ghost, and why does the human love them so much?” 

essentially, these stories teach the same lesson - engaging with ghosts is bad - in two different ways. the effects of the human’s wrongdoing culminate in his receiving the worst fate vs. the human’s wrongdoing is cemented in her receiving the worst fate. these story structures are so ingrained in us that they impact how stories are told, even today - since the stories are set up in the specific ways they are, things like “dangerous” romance can be cultivated from them differently.

(second, completely unrelated side note: i doubt a 365-type story could exist in this form in the me/na. "spirits” are thought of differently. it’d have to change a lot.)

back to tachioda. no matter whether you’re more used to the peony lantern-type stories or lenore-type ones, this motif can be recognized. isn’t someone you care for betraying you with a secret which endangers your life sort of like a realistic rendition of a ghost dragging you into your grave? isn’t tachibana sort of like the human in those stories, where his love care for oda was what inspired him to not run away from his problems anymore by “sacrificing” himself? 

oda’s something like the human, too - he did something he knew was against tachibana’s interest out of said poor judgement, which was blinded by his love. and just like both the human and the ghost were banished, oda’s judgement led to events that got tachibana killed. 

regardless of who’s who, oda carried both tachibana and himself to their deaths. but is it more similar to the peony lantern, or to lenore? 

let’s see if tachioda follows a five-act structure, for one:

introduction: oda works with tachibana. we know they’re very close, but not how. oda seems antagonistic towards kiryu for some reason. oda begrudgingly works with kiryu.

rising action: the search for the owner of the lot goes on. eventually, it’s discovered that it’s makoto, and they head to sotenbori to get her. we learn some stuff about their backstory from the video store owner. makoto and oda encounter each other, and seem to recognize one another. he’s antagonistic towards her.

climax: he eventually tries to kill her. kiryu stops him.

falling action: he spills and is left to fend for himself.

resolution: oda is dead. tachibana learns about it.

completely unrelated post-resolution occurrence: tachibana is inspired to stop running away from his problems.

in the five-act structure, the climax is the most intense moment - the moment where the main character’s goal and what it came in conflict with is at its peak. oda’s attempt to kill makoto is very intense, and where his antagonism both towards her and kiryu comes to a head. but what’s the conflict here?

if you want to find a conflict, you have two options: oda vs. makoto and oda vs. kiryu. since oda’s reveal is seen in the form of a buildup of antagonism that comes near his death, with his death serving as a resolution, there’s one conclusion here - oda is a twist villain. he dies, and makoto and kiryu won.

interpreting the story this way skews things a bit. namely, for a twist villain to work in a 5-act structure, they need to have been involved in the conflict that was driving the story all along. oda was a mole for shibusawa all along, yes, but...that’s it. it didn’t really go any further than him having given shibusawa’s men their location. in terms of a conflict of oda vs. makoto or kiryu, his death wasn’t the culmination of those things - not directly, at least. it didn’t “resolve” any arcs.

makoto’s main situation in the game is dealing with her life on the line with the empty lot in her hands and wanting to meet with her brother, not to mention grappling with everything she’s faced. within that, the identity of the person who trafficked her isn’t represented in a conflict. it’s a conflict - a question. that doesn’t mean it didn’t cause her significant trauma, and that doesn’t mean she isn’t struggling with it; it means that it was presented in a specific way. think about how she found oda - by chance when oda and kiryu came for her. after everything happened, and oda died, she had her answer. we see her reaction to it and everything else she’d faced in the rest of the game.

oda came across makoto so we would know what would happen when she saw him. makoto’s writing...could be better, to say the least, but i think this is a more harrowing presentation of what trauma can feel like. it’s not something that you overcome in a decisive conversation or battle, it’s something that sticks with you, even if you have all the pieces together. 

kiryu’s conflict with oda pre-reveal was...nothing, really. even in 5-act structure terms. oda was just an ass to him. if anything, oda had been begrudgingly helping kiryu this far. nothing much other than that going on there, really.

with tachibana, the “conflict” between them isn’t so explicit. we may have some indication that tachibana knows something is going on with oda (which i talked about in my last post from a while ago), and we learn about their past together. until he learns about oda’s death, that’s the most of it. their on-screen interaction is mostly bare-bones.

so, yes, this is a conflict, but we only really see one party propelling the events in it. oda’s also going against tachibana’s interests, but tachibana isn’t involved, and doesn’t even know until it’s too late. he has no “goal” against oda. oda’s also trying to kill makoto, but even that’s only one-sided. she’s no big fan of oda, but she has no “goal” against him. if you see oda vs. tachibana as a conflict that’s driving the story, how tachibana reacts to oda’s death seems out of place - it has nothing to do with any sort of “goal” against oda, let alone resolving any goals, so we can’t say tachibana’s reaction is a resolution to a conflict that came before it. that’s why i put it as a “completely unrelated post-resolution occurrence”. 

but oda had reason to be apprehensive - is an oda vs. himself conflict propelling the story? nope. even though it was something he chose to do under specific circumstances, oda’s already made his decision. he’s not convinced out of it until he’s caught. he’s conflicted, but his misguided perceptions motivate him to continue, so what’s driving him forward is not his internal conflict against anyone. it’s his goal. 

he’s following his goal, which comes in conflict with tachibana and makoto’s goals, which is what makes events occur, which means that in terms of the four-act structure...he’s a twist villain? not so fast.

like pretty much every yakuza subplot that lasts throughout the whole game, the tachioda subplot follows a jo-ha-kyu structure:

jo: tachibana seems eager to get close to kiryu. he relays that he’s had difficulty trusting people in the past. on the other hand, oda seems antagonistic towards kiryu for some reason, but begrudgingly works with him. the search for the owner of the lot goes on. meanwhile, from makoto and wei han lee, we learn that she was trafficked while looking for her brother. the person who trafficked her had a bat tattoo. in a later scene, it’s revealed that tachibana has the same bat tattoo. later, kiryu and oda go to sotenbori. we learn about their (mostly tachibana’s) past from the video store owner. 

ha: makoto and oda encounter each other, and seem to recognize one another. he’s antagonistic towards her, which climbs in severity as oda drives them to a “safe spot”.

kyu: oda tries to kill makoto, but he’s stopped. oda spills everything. kiryu leaves him to fend for himself. tachibana learns about his death and stops running away from his problems.

yes, that’s a new thing i didn’t talk about before. jo-ha-kyu is a japanese artistic structure extrapolated from the chinese literary concepts of fu-bi-xing. by “artistic structure” i mean that it’s a structure that’s applied to a lot of stuff. in our case, it’s a narrative structure used in movies, tv shows, and games.

progression-wise, jo-ha-kyu is similar to four-act, when you think about it. (sort of like how the five-act structure generally follows a larger pattern of “beginning-climax-resolution.) jo-ha-kyu is about a slow development of actions and context (jo), a sudden and quick dramatic heightening of the tension (ha), and an even quicker finish (kyu). the point of this is to show exactly how the “conflict” affects the story before it’s taken care of. the something it leads up to (or doesn’t) isn’t the “climax” - it’s as much of the point as the events are. like with four and five act structures, there’s a philosophy-based reason as to why this exists in the way it does but i’m not sure i could articulate it well.

what happens is that we’re presented with context and later get some indications of what’s “really” going on. then, oda and makoto see each other, and the pace heightens. as they escape from being pursued, oda’s antagonism builds until he tries to kill her. our questions are answered when he’s stopped and reveals everything, giving us context to everything we’ve seen. the conclusion is the rest - it’s not entirely linear because this plot affects both makoto and tachibana. with jo-ha-kyu, like with four-act, plots often don’t “resolve” and can lead to others.

the fun part about this is that you can incorporate a four-act sequence into a part of a larger jo-ha-kyu story to build it up even more. this manifests itself via the oda vs. makoto subplot like this:

introduction: makoto and oda encounter each other, and seem to recognize one another. he’s antagonistic towards her, and that antagonism builds.

development: oda takes them to the “safe spot”. eventually, he tries to kill her. he’s stopped.

pivot: oda spills everything.

conclusion: oda is left to his fate.

this is essentially the “ha” and “kyu” in the larger jo-ha-kyu of the tachioda subplot, and a part of the development makoto’s plot. with makoto, what happened to her was a significant part of her past, so knowing what would happen when she saw oda allows her to take matters into her own hands. (even though the writers screwed that up.) 

with tachioda, it "pivots” from oda’s devotion to tachibana (thesis) and takes us to something that seems to contradict it (antithesis) before putting this in context of the devotion established beforehand (synthesis). oda and makoto’s relationship is also the “antithesis” to the thesis of oda and tachibana’s relationship and oda’s characterization as tachibana’s right hand arm man. the synthesis is oda choosing to leave himself to his fate. this also happens so tachibana can learn about his death, and we receive another confirmation - tachibana wanted to trust him.

tachibana’s death is also not a “resolution” to anything. since tachibana is tied to the main plot, this leads to complications for kiryu and makoto both. long story short, makoto confronts the lieutenants, and kiryu later confronts shibusawa. it wouldn’t have been so direct if tachibana hadn’t died, if oda hadn’t died, if oda had better judgement, if oda and tachibana hadn’t bumped into each other in the street in sotenbori, if oda hadn’t trafficked people. but still...

is oda a twist villain here? i’ll answer this by stating what i’ve been implying the whole time: oda as a character doesn’t work in a five-act structure. he’s also not important enough to the game’s plot for a neat yes or no answer. this leads us to some semantics. since we’re speaking in english, “antagonist” implies a character who’s an opposing force to the hero/protagonist, and “villain” implies that the force is tied to nefarious motivations or morals. the two are different, but there’s always some sort of opposition, like with five-act structure. 

since we’re talking about a japanese game, japanese has these:

katakiyaku (敵役) - a character who’s role is to be against the protagonist

akuyaku (悪役) - someone who’s considered morally evil in a specific scene/incident/plot

akujin (悪人) - someone who’s very existence is evil; warumono (悪者) - a bad person

the first two japanese definitions are mutually exclusive from the third. they refer to context because they’re translations of the vaguer, european (or specifically anglo here) concept that these are intrinsic story roles. it’s not that villains or antagonists didn’t exist in japanese stories beforehand. it’s that in four-act, a villain doesn’t have to be there for “bad” to happen. see how those kabuki stock character descriptions primarily detail what characters do in a story? compare them to these commedia dell’arte stock character descriptions which primarily detail traits. a four-act villain is morally “bad” because that’s a reflection, not an explanation, of who they are in the story as a whole. that linkage serves as a counterpoint to the hero’s goodness and amplifier of their dastardly actions rather than as two inherently connected forces. 

hero vs. villain is still a conflict in jo-ha-kyu and four-act story structure. you fight shibusawa at the end of the game, don’t you? he went out of his way to do what he did, which his less than “moral” backstory gives context to. the only things oda has in that regard are a checkered past and poor judgement. oda was propelled by his goal to do things that went against tachibana and makoto...after he and tachibana saw the latter’s family in a documentary. he came across it, and he reacted to it. oda’s association with the antagonists and former sex trafficking were bad, but he’s not a “villain” like shibusawa is - it’s not his role in the story.

if anything, i’d say that oda was absolutely intended to be a twist “bad guy”, as in twist “guy who did a succession of really bad things, realized the scope of them almost by chance each time, and paid the price.” but we can’t call him a “villain” in the english/five-act way because what he did, his role as a character, and his goals are entirely separate. the last we see of him is his rebuffing shibusawa when he asks why oda “screwed up” - even without kiryu and makoto there, we’re shown that his regret is real. the best we have to describe this in english is “morally gray”.

that doesn’t mean he’s portrayed as being in the right, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’re supposed to sympathize with or even like him, though. the game doesn’t deny that oda’s actions were bad, but it’s not in the business of exploring this through oda as a “ghost” figure pit against the “humans”. like i said in my last post, if they wanted to do this, they easily could have. the main story could happen without oda - his role is to flesh out the world tachibana and makoto find themselves in. he’s a plot device. that’s it.

part of this is done through makoto’s journey. the other part is through tachibana and oda’s feelings about each other. (and also in that they’re foils but that’s another post.) they’re in a chain of events that implies animosity - betrayal - but something is different from what we expect. oda’s devotion to tachibana is the obvious thing. the scene with the car that i already talked about in my last post, a little less so.

other than that, most of what we know about how they behaved, felt, and thought until the “ha” is implied or summarized through anecdotes outside of them. the one thing underlying all of this doesn’t come out until it’s too late. oda realizes the gravity of keeping this secret and chooses to “redeem”* himself by divulging and staying behind. once tachibana reacts to that knowledge, we truly know.

(*another semantics thing - “redeem” in english has the meaning of “redemption arc”, as if it negates bad things or makes up for them. i mean “redeem” here in the “culmination of everything he’d done” way.)

we see oda first as someone who’s close to tachibana, and we only find out what he did and why as he’s dying. in turn, his death is used to confirm something about tachibana that had only been hinted at - his fear and his vulnerability. his priorities in the people he cares about and how he wants to do right by them despite those. (he lost his arm for oda.) by focusing on how tachibana and oda felt about each other within the context of what happened to them, we’re given a story about two people who were close, and one of them trying to work against the inevitable by keeping it that way. the tachioda subplot follows the same style of subversion as the peony lantern. 

regardless, oda didn’t come into the game as a “ghost”; he becomes one, both in the plot and in our perception. the focus is on their relationship within what’s happening. like in the peony lantern, what makes this so appealing is that you can connect the emotional dots yourself. both oda and tachibana’s deaths were inevitable, but whether or not they were “deserved” serves to deepen the emotional significance of their deaths on the part of the player, rather than clarified universally to drive the plot. for people like me who ship them, it’s not in spite of what oda did, but in tandem with it. 

i think part of the reason why tachioda may be so contentious with english-speaking fans is because of all of this. remember: your view of the world is, more likely than not, never going to be perfectly objective.

tldr: intentionally or not, tachioda is framed in the same way supernatural romances like twilight typically are. pretty cool!

[theres-a-motif-for-that]

Poor Echo, honestly

[popculturelib]

Haunted States of America: West Virginia

Coffin Hollow and Other Ghost Tales (1977) ed. by Ruth Ann Musick, with a foreword by William Hugh Jansen and illustrated by Archie L. Musick

Coffin Hollow is a folklore-focused book, consisting of stories collected by the author, her students, oral legends, and other publications. Musick writes:

For years now I've been trying to save just the stories and general lore of West Virginia. To me, these tales are almost as fascinating and individual as the state itself. One of the things I particularly like is that the tale-tellers are so sincere. Aside from legends -- and no one knows exactly how a legend originates -- these tales are told as the actual experiences of the contributors or of their relatives or friends. In almost every case the original teller, at least, believes that he or the person involved has had a supernatural experience.

Notably, Coffin Hollow includes a list of the folklore motifs in each story, following the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955-1958) by folklorist Stith Thompson. For example, the motif for the story from which this book takes its title is E232.1 -- Return from dead to slay own murderer.

Other books about ghosts in West Virginia include:

A Ghostly Tour of Harpers Ferry (1982) by Shirley Dougherty, drawings by Suzanne Randell

Lively Ghosts of the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia (1991) by Susan Crites

Elk River Ghosts, Tales & Lore (2002) by Mack Samples

The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States.  Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use. Visit our website at https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html.

[laurasimonsdaughter]

A wild (mother) goose chase for a lost fairy tale

In august 2020 Forbes published an article about how writer and illustrator Pete Jordi Wood had uncovered a “charming gay fairytale” that “has been lost for 200 years”. In particular a story where a sailor wins the hand in marriage of a handsome prince. Wood is quoted as calling it an “unbelievably and fabulously gay” plot, and: “an ancient tale with a positive portrayal, of a guy who can be read as gay or asexual, but certainly queer”.

Obviously I was wild to read it, but sadly Wood’s adaptation of the fairy tale had been published as a limited edition children’s book and virtual exhibition that I could not access. Even more disheartening, the folklore sources were not named on his website, and his research was only available in a limited edition essay collection and zine that I would have to buy.

To make matters worse, the Forbes article said that Wood had translated variations of the story from Danish, German and Frisian. That was absolutely too close to home for me not to go looking for it! Except I had very little to go on, because again, Forbes didn’t give sources.

The article said only this:

Wood called the story “The Dog And The Sailor”

The protagonist is an adventurous sailor with an overprotective mother who defeats a beautiful evil witch and wins the hand in marriage of a handsome prince.

Wood found it in the Stith Thompson’s six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature under a tale type called “The Dog and the Sea” which existed in multiple languages (Danish, German, Frisian and others), but not in English.

It was first written down in the 1800’s.

I could find only one mention online with more information, on the Simmons University website:

“Originally a Danish folktale documented by the folklorists Nikolaj Christensen and Jens Kamp, this story has been translated into English for the first time by Pete Jordi Wood.”

The consequence of all this is that I have been hunting for this fairy tale for a very long time and with the help of two amazing Danish followers and a lot of frantic internet searches, I’m finally convinced that I have! So, if you want to follow me into my obsession, you can find it all under the readmore.

Of course the first thing I did was try to find this tale type “The Dog and the Sea” in the Stith Thompson Motif-Index, but it was a dead end. I couldn’t find any fairy tale called “The Dog and the Sea” or “The Dog and the Sailor” anywhere. What I was able to find was a podcast called “There’s a Story for That” that gave a recap and review of Wood’s “The Dog and the Sailor”. So now at least I knew the full outline of the story:

A beautiful, evil witch curses a faraway tropical kingdom, charming everyone into submission, transforming them into animals and sinking the kingdom to the bottom of the ocean.

An English boy called Ruan wants to become a sailor and his protective mother eventually lets him go after he fails at being a tailor.

She gives him her life savings, a medical balm and a dagger.

Ruan joins a sailing crew, shipwrecks in a storm and washes up on the shores of France.

When his money runs out he gets so desperate that he contemplates walking into the sea, but at that moment a curly haired dog emerges from the waves and offers to help him. He fills Ruan’s purse with money and instructs him to pay double for everything he buys.

When he has spent all the money Ruan returns to the dog, gets a thousand gold pieces and is instructed to get a ship and a crew.

They sail off, but the sea witch sends a storm dragon to sink them. The dog defeats the dragon while the crew hides below deck.

They find the dog grievously wounded, but Ruan heals him with his mother’s balm.

The dog tells Ruan to go out in a row boat and jump into the sea, much to the terror of the crew.

Ruan sinks to the sunken kingdom unharmed and the dog leads Ruan to the town, where a beautiful woman (the witch) comes to meet him.

She promises him half of her kingdom if he’ll be her spouse. Ruan refuses and stabs her to death with the dagger. She explodes into dust, leaving behind only a belt with silver keys.

Ruan enters the castle and the dog is already inside to lead him to the dungeon, where they find a caged lion.

The dog instructs Ruan to cut off his head and tail and swap their places. This turns the lion into an old man, the king.

The king praises Ruan for being the only person who managed to resist the witch. All the animals in the castle turn human, including the dog, who is the king’s son.

The king suggests Ruan and his son rule the kingdom together. Ruan wants to accept, but feels he has to return to his mother. So the king gives him a ship full of gold instead. By then the kingdom has risen to the surface again.

Ruan sails back to his mother, who praises him, but tells him to go back to marry his prince.

He returns and marries the handsome prince.

The next step was looking at the mentioned authors, I was lucky enough to come across a book by Stephen Badman, who had translated a large selection of the fairy tales Jens Kamp published in 1879 and 1891 and published them in 2016 under the title “Folk and Fairy Tales from Denmark – Stories collected by Jens Kamp”. I couldn’t be sure that the right story was in there, but it was! The book included a story called David Cotterson (David Husmandssøn), which was clearly Wood’s source, but did have notable differences:

The witch and the kingdom are never mentioned in the beginning.

The hero is called David, his nationality is not given, he has two parents and no parting gifts are mentioned.

He shipwrecks and washes up on the coast of England.

The helpful dog is described as “large, black and shaggy”.

The dog gives David first five hundred ducats, then a thousand ducats, and the third time two thousand ducats and the assignment to have a ship built.

Again the crew hides from a storm and the dog gets injured, but the dog gives David a flask of healing oil to cure him with. It is never said that the witch causes the storm.

The dog warns David explicitly that he will meet a beautiful woman near a golden castle, who would attempt to seduce him, but that if he gives her as much as a kiss all will be lost.

He gives David a sword an instructs him to cut her down, take her keys, and go to the castle where he will be waiting for him.

As soon as he kills the woman he hears his crew shout, because suddenly the land has risen to the surface again.

Only now it is revealed that the woman was an evil witch who had sent the land to the bottom of the sea.

Once transformed back into humans, the dog and lion explain that the evil witch had been the king’s second wife.

The king offers David half the kingdom as a reward, but David wants to go home, so they fill his ship with treasure instead.

David says goodbye to the prince and the king, sails home to England, sells his ship, shares the riches with his crew, returns to his overjoyed parents and settles down with them to live a long, happy life.

I personally really enjoy this folktale. It’s fun and quite unusual. I’ve posted a more complete summary here for extra context. Also, Badman’s translations are very pleasant to read, I really recommend buying this book. Now I’ve read his source, I’m inclined to agree with one part of Wood’s claims, that you could read it as asexual. It’s pretty rare to find a fairy tale like this that doesn’t end in a wedding. But the fact that this Danish tale doesn’t end in a marriage, unlike Wood’s adaptation, does rather dampen the “lost gay fairy tale” claim.

But there are other versions of this story! I thought it might possible that one of the stories might have ended with “rule side by side with my son”, which really would be very easy to read as a “gay marriage without calling it a marriage”. So, I wanted to see if Nikolaj Christensen had also collected a variant. Sadly, Christensen’s work is even more obscure than Kamp’s outside Scandinavia. Again, Stephen Badman has translated some of them, but I had no idea what the folktale would be called and I couldn’t exactly justify buying several books just in the hope that it would be in there.

As far as I could tell, there had been only one complete collection of Christensen’s work: Folkeeventyr fra Kær herred (Folk tales from Kær Herred), by Nikolaj Christensen, published by Laurits Bødker with Akademisk forlag; København (1963-67). The index is available online and it seemed to me that “Matrosen og kongen” (The sailor and the king) or “Et sømandsæventyr” (A sailor tale) had definite potential to be the story I was looking for.

So, I decided to ask my Tumblr dash for Danish help. And let me tell you, the Danes delivered. @violetdesolation messaged me that they had found the book in their university library and kindly offered to send me some scans. They found both “Matrosen og kongen” and “Et sømandsæventyr” for me, but noticed that the book they got didn’t include all the folktales in the index I found. We both looked for a dog that turned into a prince, but found nothing.

But by then a second helpful Dane had gotten their hands on the book and this time it was the complete version! They kindly offered to skim the whole thing for me and just to be sure I gave a whole list of story elements to look out for. And that is how we uncovered that “Et sømandsæventyr” (A sailor tale) was actually the story I was looking for! Only it was just different enough from “David Husmandssøn” that I hadn’t noticed! In this version the protagonist was Dutch instead of English and in the end it never even clearly says that the dog turns into a prince! But it was definitely a variant of the same story. It has many similarities with Kemp’s version, but a few key differences:

The protagonist is called Johan, only his father is mentioned, and they are said to be Dutch.

He shipwrecks and washes up in France, not England.

Johan actually tries to drown himself.

The talking dog is specifically said to be a poodle.

There are a lot of details missing, like the description of the storm that injures the dog or the specific method to transform the lion back into a human.

The witch is described merely as “beautiful” and while she does suggest marriage to Johan it is never said that no one else could resist her or that many have tried.

While the dog does say he is a transformed prince, the story never states that he becomes human again (hence why Violetdesolation and I didn’t find the story on first glance).

This king does not speak and this witch is not revealed to be his second wife.

As a reward Johan may choose between becoming a minister in the saved kingdom’s government or to leave with as much gold as he can carry, he chooses the gold and goes home, but his father is not mentioned again.

If you want to read the full story, you can! You can find the scans of the Danish text that the kind @violetdesolation provided here, and a full English translation can be found here, courtesy of the second Danish folklore sleuth, who preferred to stay anonymous. I also want to give a big shout-out to @ymfingsteadilyon who also offered to get the book from their library.

So now I had confirmation that this was indeed a Danish fairy tale first recorded in the 1800’s, that, while sadly lacking a gay wedding, did definitely invite being read through a queer lens. However, the article had claimed there was also a German and a Frisian version. Which probably meant there was also a Dutch version and I was determined to find it (and see if it ended in marriage).

It was at this point that I finally finally found the tale type with both “dog” and “sea” in it. The correct name wasn’t  “The Dog and the Sea”, it was “The Dog in the Sea”, ATU type 540. To my intense frustration the most complete online ATU index had no examples in that category whatsoever, but at least I knew it existed.

And now I knew the correct name for the tale type, I found this. A German fairy tale encyclopedia from 1990 (the online version was behind a paywall, but I managed to find the book: Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1988/1990, ISBN 978-3-11-011763-9) that had a whole entry on this tale type including sources. My German was just good enough to understand these things:

This really was the correct tale type for both Christensen’s and Kamp’s stories and a summary was indeed given in Aarne and Thomson’s folklore classifications.

They presumed that Christensen’s version from 1855 was the oldest.

There were also Swedish and Finnish versions, but these deviated rather a lot from the Danish ones.

There was possibly also a Russian version that might fit this type.

There was also a Dutch version from a publication from 1900/1901.

So, what was this Dutch version they wrote of? The source given was “Huizenga-Onnekes, E. J.: Groninger volksvertellingen 1. Groningen 21958, 60-64; Vk. Tijdschrift voor nederlandsche folklore 13 (1900/1901) 200-202;”, but luckily I didn’t need to go looking for it. Because with the correct tale type I could find it in the Dutch folktale database.

And while it is correct that this story was first published in Dutch the 1900’s, the written source it was based on is from 1804. Which makes the Dutch version the oldest traceable source of this piece of oral folklore! Possibly explaining why Christensen’s version has a Dutch protagonist and why Kamp’s version is the most elaborate, being the most recent one. Because the Dutch version is far shorter and far less interesting:

The protagonist is a skipper who wrecks his ship and washes ashore in great misery.

A black dog comes up to him and offers help, which the skipper accepts despite fearing the dog is the devil.

When the ship is built the dog stays with the skipper so he can pay for everything, including a crew and provisions.

As they sail the dog keeps warning when there is to be a storm. First one that lasts half a day, then three days, then a week.

At last they reach a shore (not underwater) with a golden castle and the dog says it is his father’s castle.

The dog instructs the skipper to spend three nights in the castle and to be silent no matter how bad it gets.

The castle turns out to be haunted and the skipper is horribly tormented, but after the three nights the dog takes the skipper to a room with a large sword and instructs him to behead him.

Doing so turns the dog into a human, who explains that his father had cursed him to become a spectre of a dog.

He rewards the skipper with enough money to last him a lifetime and the skipper leaves with his riches.

This version was written down by 11 year-old Gerrit Arend Arends, who kept a journal around 1804 in which he recorded the stories that seamstress Trijntje “Soldaats” Wijbrands told him. The journal was discovered by his great-great-granddaughter E.J.Huizenga-Onnekes, who eventually published all 17 folktales in: Groninger Volksvertellingen I: Het Boek van Trijntje Soldaats (1928).

The story about the sailor and the enchanted dog is the 15th story in the collection and while it has no name there, I have seen later versions of it called “De dankbare hond” (The grateful dog) and “De hond die geen hond was” (The dog that wasn’t a dog).

So there we are! With a lot of kind help from unexpected places, my honour as a Dutch hobby folklorist is restored. Sadly we were not rewarded with a canon gay wedding from 19th century folklore, but a very good story nonetheless, that is indeed very inviting to read through a queer lens, and a rather triumphant end to a what started as a very wild goose chase.

EDIT: Since writing this, this tale type was added to Wikipedia, with additional interesting references! I wish I had looked for it there again between the beginning and the end of my search, because this took me so long it was published in between.

[cicerobussytransplant]

Dream House as American Gothic

A narrative needs two things to be a gothic romance. The first, “woman plus habitation.” “Horror,” film theorist Mary Ann Doane writes, “which should by rights be external to domesticity, infiltrates the home.” The house is not essential for domestic abuse, but hell, it helps: a private space where private dramas are enacted behind, as the cliché goes, closed doors; but also windows sealed against the sound, drawn curtains, silent phones. A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears. Windex is political. So is the incense you burn to hide the smell of sex, or a fight.

The second necessary element: “marrying a stranger.” Strangers, feminist film theorist Diane Waldman points out, because during the 1940s—the heyday of gothic romance films like Rebecca and Dragonwyck and Suspicion—men were returning from war, no longer familiar to the people they’d left behind. “The rash of hasty pre-war marriages (and the subsequent all-time high divorce rate of 1946), the increase in early marriages in the 40s,” Waldman writes, “and the process of wartime separation and reunion [gave the] motif of the Gothics a specific historical resonance.” “The Gothic heroine,” film scholar Tania Modleski says, “tries to convince herself that her suspicions are unfounded, that, since she loves him, he must be trustworthy and that she will have failed as a woman if she does not implicitly believe in him.”

There is, of course, a major problem with the gothic: it is by nature heteronormative. A notable exception is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with its powerful queer undertones between the innocent protagonist and the sinister, titular vampire. (“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish,” Carmilla tells Laura. “How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.”)

We were not married; she was not a dark and brooding man. It was hardly a crumbling ancestral manor; just a single-family home, built at the beginning of the Great Depression. No moors, just a golf course. But it was “woman plus habitation,” and she was a stranger. That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we’d only met with chaperones before marriage; rather because I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know (19). Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.

19. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T11, Falling in love with person never seen

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

[dragonomatopoeia]

i get caught a lot on how everyone talks about 'tropes' as highly specific shorthand when in reality they encompass a very broad spectrum of motifs that serve different narrative functions depending on how they're used

So, the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU) is used in folklore studies to catalogue folktale types in conjunction with the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. When used in tandem, you have a comprehensive catalogue of folktales and their constituent parts, broken down to the smallest most distinguishable pieces.

The Motif Index organizes motifs from "Ogres (And Satan), Kinds of Ogres, Other Ogres," (G.) etc to "Four suns at first: culture hero shoots three down" (A716.1) to "Magic object affords miraculous transportation" (D1520).

Meanwhile, the ATU index groups tales together by type, such as sorting The Search for a Lost Husband under Tale Type 425 (Beauty and The Beast, Cupid and Psyche, and Tam Lin are all collected under this one, and if you see an issue with those being grouped together, you can probably see where I'm eventually going with this)

if this sounds like the academic forerunner to tvtropes to you, then you are not entirely wrong, but I'd argue there are many differences

That said, some of my criticisms of the former apply to the latter. As convenient as the ATU index is for folklorists, it's also heavily reductive. Convenience and speed can be the enemy of nuanced evaluation and context. There's merit to taking your time when analyzing stories, especially in a comparative cultural context

Stories are made of motifs and tropes! They're the basic building blocks. But knowing a single ingredient without looking at the whole recipe tells me Nothing about the final result. I'd need to really sit down with it before I could draw conclusions.

That said, sometimes you see some Shit Ingredients right off the bat and know that you're in for hell on earth. That brings me to another shared criticism:

Thompson was an alleged homophobe, and was said to exclude any homosexual stories or themes that didn't degrade or punish homosexuality. Similar attitudes on TVtropes have surged and ebbed in waves, but are nonetheless present.

The decision to catalogue tales by the inclusion of antisemitism in the ATU index is also contentious, as there is academic importance to documenting the cultural impact and realities of antisemitism, but it also means that you can very easily search for and reference stories that were crafted specifically to be antisemitic.

There are other sources of criticism I could levy towards both systems but this post is long now and I didn't mean to write this much in the first place

tl;dr considering motifs in folklore are considered "the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition" and we refer to tropes in the same manner, then, yes, tropes are unavoidable! They're inherent elements of memorable stories. They persist through time. But a story is more than its tropes

[bluebeardsbride-archive]

Dream House as Haunted Mansion

What does it mean for something to be haunted, exactly? You know the formula instinctually: a place is steeped in tragedy. Death, at the very least, but so many terrible things can precede death, and it stands to reason that some of them might accomplish something similar. You spend so much time trembling between the walls of the Dream House, obsessively attuned to the position of her body relative to yours, not sleeping properly, listening for the sound of her footsteps, the way disdain creeps into her voice, staring dead-eyed in disbelief at things you never thought you’d see in your lifetime.

What else does it mean? It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions; that if you return somewhere often enough it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider;³¹ that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.

In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house’s ghost:³² you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you’re supposed to do. After all, you don’t need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.

31. Bennett Sims has a wonderful horror story called “House-Sitting.” You have never forgotten this paragraph: “You are not being superstitious, you do not think. It simply stands to reason. For it would be like sleeping in a house where a family has been slaughtered: whether or not you believe in ghosts, there is the atmosphere to consider.” It spoke to you, as an agnostic who still can feel when the air in an enclosed space is not quite right.

32. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Types E402.1.1.1, Ghost calls; E402.1.1.2, Ghost moans; E402.1.1.3, Ghost cries and screams; E402.1.1.4, Ghost sings; E402.1.1.5, Ghost snores; E402.1.1.6, Ghost sobs.

Carmen Maria Machado

[smokefalls]

Title: In the Dream House Author: Carmen Maria Machado First Published: 2019 Genre: nonfiction, memoir, queer lit

This was such an intelligent, beautifully crafted memoir. Frankly, I couldn’t put it down, and when I had to, I did so with great reluctance. Something Machado highlights and asserts repeatedly is how complex abuse is in queer relationships. (Side note, but her ex was garbage, wow.) In the Dream House is intricate, covering all grounds of a relationship—good and bad—that there’s a particular call for the reader to think about the human condition. This is a memoir that exposes how tenderness can become monstrous; that queerness is more than the one-dimensional depictions that history and media tend to portray.

Also Machado’s references. Holy shit, I loved all the footnotes and citations. When she brought in Saidiya Hartman’s “archival silence” (from “Venus in Two Acts”) at the very start of her memoir, I knew I was in for a treat. It’s a different approach to Hartman’s focus on slavery, but Machado took such a fascinating approach to this idea of the violence that comes with archiving. In a way, you can see how this archiving is happening (or rather, not), through the way she writes. I liked that there was an almost-vignette style to each “chapter,” evoking a ghostliness of the archive of this relationship. And my favorite was this constant reference to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The way she connected life to tropes from folklore was such a fascinating approach to show the extent that memoirs can be a form of lyrical storytelling.

I loved almost all of these vignettes, but I think my absolute favorite was “Dream House as Queer Villainy.” It encompassed so much of what queerness can be inside and outside, and in only two or so pages, left an incredible impression.

Content Warning: domestic abuse/violence, gaslighting, derogatory slurs, sexism, death/dying (including murder), drug/alcohol use, implied rape, sexual assault, queerphobia