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Bonus Ep 61 - European Medievalism in Modern Japanese Fantasy Art

Added 2024-04-26 18:56:58 +0000 UTC

patrons, here is your second bonus episode for the month of April. if you're looking for our new book club series on The Name of the Rose, we will be starting that next month with the introduction.

folks, we got a question from longtime patron Ollie Cant who asked us about various portrayals of European Medievalism in Modern Japanese fantasy art such as manga, anime, and video games. And this got us thinking a lot because, in addition to sounding like the name of a very pretentious academic paper, it's a great topic. A lot of the most famous Japanese fantasy stories are not just Medievalist but explicitly European Medievalism such as the manga Berserk, the Dark Souls and Elden Ring video games, the films of Studio Ghibli, and more. So we decided to dig into it and it turns out that it all comes back to Lord of the Rings, though maybe not in the same way we in the West think of it. There's also Conan the Barbarian and D&D and a lot more of The Inferno, than you might expect. Enjoy!

link to the youtube video on the broad Japanese fascination with Europe that Luke mentioned: https://youtu.be/jXjfzMCbaBc?si=c1f-DdyORLlvPxwS

attachment: sorry it didn't upload yesterday but here is the flow chart that Luke was discussing