 Fantasy: November 06, 2024 Issue [#12820] |
This week: Luce, a Catholic Fantasy Girl Edited by: NaNoNette  
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| "Events have mascots, it’s a part of modern life. As mascots go, the Apostolic See could have done a lot worse than Luce, even if I would prefer that she was carrying that rosary instead of wearing it — especially because I have no idea how she’ll get it over her giant head, when it’s time to take the thing off." ~ JD Flynn, Editor in Chief of The Pillar |
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Luce, a Catholic Fantasy Girl
There are several Anime and Manga stories that utilize Western religion for the imagery and as parts of the story.
Devilman: Crybaby is a crass ultra violent and gory story that mixes crucifixes, the devil, excessive raving, and demons all into one. As the series goes on, the monsters become even more over the top scary. The government resorts to witch hunts to exorcise society.
Neon Genesis Evangelion not only has all these religious words, it even goes as far as using Angel Mechas.
The mixing of Japanese fantasy and Western religion has come full circle. Instead of fighting it, the Vatican powerbrokers have embraced pop culture's obsession with unrealistically shaped characters.
Starting on December 24, 2024 and lasting until January 6, 2026, the Vatican will celebrate the 2025 Jubilee. Like the Olympics, this event also has a mascot.
Meet Luce. She is a tokidoki chibi pilgrim in a yellow rain slicker with green, mud covered boots. Her blue eyes have pilgrimage shells in them instead of pupils. She has a pilgrim's staff. And instead of holding her colorful rosary in her hand, she uses it as a necklace.
Luce is not alone. A small cast of diverse friends and her dog Santino travel with her through the storm of life. (Hence the raincoats on all of the little chibi pilgrims).
While a lot of fantasy worlds have spiritual systems, the big religions are usually very static in their approach to teaching their stories. The tradition-heavy Catholic church has flipped the old script on its head by tapping into the Zeitgeist of cute, colorful creations to get the generation that was raised by Dragonball Z to come to church.
This makes me think that fantasy worlds should start having mascots for their fictional faiths.
Who would have thought that the Vatican loves Chibis?
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Replies to my last Fantasy newsletter "Nothing Artificial Here" that asked Have you been accused of using AI when you didn't? Have you accused others of using AI?
Beholden  wrote: Thank you very much for including my short story, Blenkenstorp, in your Editor's Picks section. i think it contains a hint no my thinking regarding AI... ;)
Definitely worth reading.
oldgreywolf on wheels  wrote: From what I understand of "AI", it's still a GIGO application (garbage in-garbage out), in that you shovel possibilities into the hopper and it spits out a refined form. The user apparently has some control.
It's still a number cruncher.
I'll continue to use LibreOffice, energizing spell/grammar check when I want to, but, otherwise, everything is deenergized except the keyboard.
Using the computer to help with spelling and grammar is perfectly fine.
s  wrote: I have never accused a writer of using AI, but I have been suspicious a few times. I am on the "wrong" end of the scale. When I look at the suggestions the free version of Grammarly I was given a few years ago made, and most of them were plain wrong, I don't even trust spell and grammar checkers. Okay, not quite. I will look at the red, blue and green underlined squiggles in my Word document and decide what I want to do with them, because I type fast and typos creep in a lot. So I trust Word to find things it thinks are wrong, and I ignore over 50% of its suggestions. Just not a fan of AI in any form... especially when for a long while if you typed in the question, "Can women smoke during pregnancy?" into Google, it came up with, "Most doctors agree women should smoke during pregnancy." because Google's AI mainly scrapes Reddit for answers (ever wonder why Reddit is now top of Google search results? it's because they allow AI scraping?) and that toxic cesspool is teaching AI. Sometimes I think it'd be better if we went back to a cave wall and a stick.
I had been wondering why Reddit comes up so often. Thank you for clearing that up. AI is definitely making Google searching less useful. Because I will never trust anything I find on Reddit. Except that one time when I was contacted by a recruiter via LinkedIn and Reddit was full of warnings on how trash that company was. |
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