271: Pop Culture, Video Games, and Cosplay as Mythology (with Dr. Vivian Asimos)
Spirits
Multitude
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2022
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re joined this week by Dr. Vivian Asimos, who explains that just about anything can be mythology. Yes, including Star Wars, The Legend of Zelda, and cosplay.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of drowning, child death, and sexual assault.
Guest
Vivian Asimos is a freelance academic specializing in all things popular culture and mythology. She has produced several publications including Digital Monsters, a book exploring online horror stories. She runs the blog Incidental Mythology, dedicated to the intersections of popular culture and mythology, and is currently undertaking a research project into cosplay. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @vivianasimos
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About Us
Spirits was created by Julia Schifini, Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Schneider. We are founding members of Multitude, an independent podcast collective and production studio. Our music is "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy diamond to mythology, legends, and folklore. |
| 0:11.3 | Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. |
| 0:14.4 | I'm Amanda. |
| 0:15.4 | And I'm Julia. |
| 0:16.4 | And this episode 271, where we're joined by Dr. Vivian Assimos Vivian, welcome to the show. |
| 0:21.5 | Hello. |
| 0:22.5 | Dr. Assimos, can you tell us a little bit about what you study and what your area of |
| 0:26.9 | expertise is? |
| 0:27.9 | Yes, so I'm an anthropologist specializing in mythology and particularly contemporary |
| 0:34.0 | mythology. |
| 0:35.0 | I spent a lot of time studying online horror stories as mythology, analyzing them, using |
| 0:42.4 | very typical anthropological analyses for myths to learn a lot more about our contemporary |
| 0:48.6 | society. |
| 0:49.6 | So yeah, I spend a lot of time talking about popular culture and contemporary stories |
| 0:54.0 | as our mythology. |
| 0:55.6 | Excellent. |
| 0:56.6 | I feel like that's a great place to start because I know that you currently teach an |
| 0:59.8 | online course called Digital Monsters, which is the study of online monstrosity. |
| 1:04.2 | Can you tell us a little bit about that? |
| 1:05.7 | I don't want, I want people to go and take the course, obviously, but I would love to |
| 1:08.7 | hear a little bit of like teasers about it. |
| 1:11.1 | Well, so digital monsters are, it's obviously my favorite. |
... |
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