Tweet
Humanity's struggle against monstrous creatures has been a perennial favourite of storytellers for thousands of years. We see it in Gilgamesh's battle against Humbaba, Beowulf's doomed struggle against Grendel and the dragon, and Ahab's bitter feud against Moby Dick. Today, the trope is perhaps more popular than it has ever been. Who can count the monsters we have slain in games such as Dark Souls, The Witcher or Monster Hunter?Given their popularity, it is notoriously hard to define what makes a monster. Is it their prodigious size, otherness, grotesqueness, their ability to harm? A monster could manifest as a great white shark, a Nazi, Giger's xenomorph or even a two-headed calf. The only constant is deviancy of some sort, and a sense of transgression against the norms we understand the world by. Hence our impulse to exterminate monsters, to push them to the margins, to wall them off.
And yet, even this vague definition doesn't always hold true. In Monster Hunter World, it isn't the monsters who transgress, but the players who encroach on their territories. Here, monsters belong. They don't lurk in the dark margins of the world; they're simply a part of that world, minding their own business unless disturbed. They are extravagant without being grotesque, strange without being deformed. They're dangerous, but never evil, and the harm they do is purely physical, never spiritual or metaphysical. They're closer to animals than most monsters, but still, they're not exactly naturalistic, but rather caricatures of nature. The marvellous diversity and complexity of actual animal life may have served as a starting off point, but it has been condensed, rearranged, exaggerated and blown up to larger-than-life dimensions.
Read more…
More...