My second week of research was a little more tightly packed with other class assignments so I wasn’t able to research as much as I would’ve liked to. However, I did do a bit more research into both more mythology and into the more technical aspects of my project.
I decided for this week I would like to focus a lot more on Japanese mythology. There are a lot of different gods and demons in Japanese mythology. However unlike Greek mythology, a lot of the demons are not individual characters, rather they’re more akin to different species or races of monsters. However, through my research I did come across different stories of different heroes fighting villains. What interested me was a lot of these stories came from kabuki theatre plays which has a distinct costume and art style that I might want to incorporate into my redesigns of each character. In particular, there’s the story of Kintaro/Kintoki and his journey to kill the Oni(demon) king Shuten Douji. There was also an interesting story regarding the gods Amaterasu, the sun goddess and her brother Susano-o, the god of storms. After killing one of her attendants, Amaterasu falls into a depression and prevents the sun from shining. Susano-o was exiled from heaven and only allowed back in after slaying the multi-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi. He ends up killing him and forging a sword with his spine or back. There is also another story with the toad sage Jiraiya and his rivalry with his former pupil Orochimaru, the snake sage. I thought this dynamic was pretty interesting considering that snakes eat toads, making Jiraiya a sort of underdog hero. In fact, there seems to be a big theme of serpents being villains in these mythologies. I’m guessing it is because snakes are often poisonous and dangerous, leading to a natural aversion to them.
I haven’t done too much research on Norse mythology, I plan on doing more during my free time. However, I do like the rivalry between the well-known gods Thor and Loki. Norse mythology is pretty fascinating in that a lot of these characters, including villains make reoccurring appearances, particularly Loki. While he can be considered evil, especially as he is the main leader in the prophetic war of Ragnarok against the gods, he is a trickster god, who often causes less harmful mischief just to mess with people. I hope to read a bit more on this mythology further in the week.
I also decided to look up a tutorial on motions graphics to try to gain a bit more information on the medium. I haven’t finished it but it has been pretty helpful and has been teaching me the basics. I also plan to watch more of this tutorial during this week.