Pop Culture, Video Games, and Cosplay as Mythology w/ 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
Housekeeping
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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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Spears podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. |
| 0:11.1 | Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Amanda. And I'm Julia. |
| 0:16.2 | In this episode 271, where we're joined by Dr. Vivian Asimus. Vivian, welcome to the show. Hello. |
| 0:22.5 | Dr. Asimos, can you tell us a little bit about what you study and what your area of |
| 0:26.8 | expertise is? Yeah, so I'm an anthropologist specializing in mythology and particularly |
| 0:32.9 | contemporary mythology. I spent a lot of time studying online horror stories as mythology, |
| 0:41.1 | analyzing them using very typical anthropological analyses for myths to learn a lot more about |
| 0:48.0 | our contemporary society. So yeah, I spend a lot of time talking about popular culture and |
| 0:52.2 | contemporary stories as are mythology. |
| 0:55.9 | Excellent. I feel like that's a great place to start because I know that you currently teach an |
| 0:59.9 | online course called Digital Monsters, which is the study of online monstrosity. Can you tell us a little |
| 1:04.9 | bit about that? I don't want, I want people to go and take the course, obviously, but I would love |
| 1:08.6 | to hear a little bit of like like, teasers about it. |
| 1:16.2 | Well, so digital monsters are, it's obviously my favorite. It's what I specialized. I spent a lot of time digging into it. I wrote a book on it. I love them. But basically, the course as well as my book, |
| 1:21.8 | kind of talks a lot about what monsters mean. So all of these different monsters that we have in contemporary society |
| 1:30.5 | all mean something in the way that our myths used to mean things and our myths still mean things. |
| 1:36.8 | And so basically it's starting to do a little bit of an analysis of them, kind of digging into |
| 1:42.1 | them and explaining a little bit about what some of them |
| 1:45.5 | are actually saying. So I do spend time on The Slender Man because he's my boy. But I also talk about |
| 1:52.2 | Ben Drowned and I talk about the Momo Challenge and Lavender Town Syndrome is in the book but not |
| 1:59.8 | the course. So I've got, I try to delve into all sorts of different ones, and I'm always looking at new ones as well. |
... |
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