Introduction

Monsters have fascinated us since time immemorial, springing from our cultural imaginations and appearing in our stories, myths, legends, fairy tales, literature, artwork, poetry, comic books, films, television shows, and, of course, video games. Monstrous beings embody our fears, anxieties, and prejudices, while also being irresistible figures whose forms and stories are continuously re-envisioned, remediated, and even sometimes redeemed. The concept of monstrosity itself is a form of chimera, defying classification and categorization, morphing and mutating to fit all kinds of analytical moulds. This is perhaps because monsters themselves are ambiguous and often contradictory figures. As Rosi Braidotti (2011) has pointed out, monsters “represent the in-between, the mixed, the ambivalent as implied in the ancient Greek root of the word for ‘monsters’: teras, which means both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration, placed between the sacred and the profane” (p. 216, emphasis in original). In this sense, while the monster is a villain in countless stories and media, it is really an ambiguous figure, defying clear categorization as either “bad” or “good.” For example, in his book Monster Theory, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996) discusses how the figure of the monster often symbolically polices the borders of what is permissible, signalling that to step outside of social norms risks either “attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself” (p. 12). Yet, at the same time, some monsters can be guardians or protectors, such as the kaiju Mothra; they may also be objects of dangerous or transgressive romantic interest, such as vampires or sirens; or they can be cute companions, like Pokémon—short for “Pocket Monsters.” The monstrous also sometimes offers space for the subversion of hegemonic norms and power structures (see Wilson, 2020) and a point of identification for marginalized groups. For instance, feminist activists have reclaimed a figure like Medusa as a symbol of women’s rage against oppressive patriarchal systems, and even a pop star like Lady Gaga has used the term “monster” to refer to the queerness, deviance, and non-normativity of herself and her fans.

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