I’m sorry to say that this year I won’t be taking part in April A-to-Z. I already had a plan in mind for this year’s A to Z by the time last year’s ended, but I kept putting off working on it, and consequently instead of it all being done by January, I still haven’t made even half a start to it. And I’ve got a take-home test and a research project due in April, so there’s just no way I’d have time to do it on the fly. Not unless I was going to abandon my plan and just post anything, willy-nilly, that happened to have to do with the letter of the day. That I could do, but I’d feel like I was being half-assed, and I wouldn’t like the results.
But I’ve done a little bit of the pre-work for what I was going to do this year, so if I keep building on that, I should be able to do it next year. So I’ll go ahead and tell you what I was planning, as a long-range preview.
Last year, my thing was comparative mythology, with no post-titling myth one that had been represented in video games, using the Shin Megami Tensei series as my guideline about what had made it into games and what hadn’t. (Because if it hasn’t made into a MegaTen game, it’s probably not in any game. Very heavy mythology and folklore basis to those games. That’s part of what I love about them.)
So what I was going to do this year was the reverse: I was going to exclusively look at mythical beings that are included in the Shin Megami Tensei series (limiting myself to the games that have officially come out in English) and compare what the game says about the original myths to the original myths themselves. And then looking at how else the myths have been treated in popular culture otherwise, where applicable. I got most of the way through compiling the list of possible subjects, but no further than that. And there’s a lot that was going to go into it just from the list to the final selection, since I wanted to make sure that every major region of the world was well represented, and to make sure I had some decent sources for the original material.
…
And I guess that’s about all I have to say in this post. I’m only just barely beginning to actually recover from my cold/bronchitis, so things have been pretty dull around here. And I haven’t been able to go into the library to do the ludicrously massive amount of research we’re supposed to do for the take-home test, either. (Which really, really sucks, let me tell you. That take-home test is evil. It’s brain-dead, parroting busy work, appropriate to low-level undergrads, not graduate students. We should not have to put up with this garbage.)
We're All Mad Here! 