Monsters and Monstrosity in Gilded Souls
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If you hang around this journal at all, you know it was bound to happen. This won't hurt a bit.
MONSTERS AND MONSTROSITY IN THE WORLD OF GILDED SOULS
The Nature of the Beast
The mentality behind monsters in Gilded Souls is the same mentality which fosters fashion with an obsessive emphasis on openings and edges, and keeps abstract expressionism from really existing as an artistic movement. (Both of which I will expound upon in later posts, if that’s your bag.) Across the globe, societies place great emphasis on where people end, and the rest of the world begins, fostering a fear of gaps, places in our bodies and the defenses of our minds which are open, and can thus be easily breached by outside forces.
Now, quickly, before we go any further: in our own world, the ~real world~, we often create monsters in order to patrol the borders of reality. For example, if I can get all Anglo-Saxon on you for a moment, Grendel is described early in Beowulf as a “mearcstapa”. Now, a “mearc” is a limit or a boundary, and thanks to how hilariously consistent English can sometimes be, you can probably pick out the meaning of “mearcstapa” for yourself. Grendel is a “border-walker” or a “boundary-stepper”, a creature who stands as a marker at the very edge of the world.
However, that concept would be anathema in Gilded Souls. Monsters are not meant to stay on the borders. They are meant to stay out. Boundaries are there for a reason, damn it, and their first duty is to keep monstrosities and wild entropic forces (which are often one and the same) away from the soft fleshy chewability that is the human race. If a monster is walking the border, the thought goes, it is because the border is broken.
But let’s be honest. You’re not here for the smatterings of Old English and monster theory. You’re here because you want to know what’s hiding under the bed in Gilded Souls. Before we hit you with a shot of that though, I need to explain what constitutes a monster in this world Aria and I have created.
Monsters are the creatures that:
-exploit naturally occurring gaps in the human body/mind
-are visibly effected by the entropic nature of the world*
-or, conversely, are invisibly effected by the entropic nature of the world
*creatures who exhibit no distinction between themselves and the outside world also fall under this heading.
Any one of these traits (or a combination of several) is enough to set up one scary motherfucker. And so, because bullet points are delicious and bite-sized, we can break down those three points into three different kinds of monsters. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and none of these these points necessarily exclude one another (except, of course, for the last two), but it’s a nice neat way to do an overview.
And yeah, yeah, I know, no pictures. Which is weird for me. But I don't want to have to find visual approximations of these creatures. I want you to use your imaginations.
So. Make sure your closet door is tightly shut, your collar is pulled up to your chin, and that your mouth isn’t hanging open. Here we go.
Monsters Who Exploit Naturally-Occurring Gaps
RUSALKI
Key thing about the Rusalka. No one has any idea what it looks like. There is rarely a description of it in the stories, and if there is, it varies widely from telling to telling. But rest assured, it’s never, ever beautiful.
The singing, however, is. And it’s the one thing that everyone agrees upon. The creature doesn’t have a voice, really, instead it simply...sings music. An enchanting melody that some say has words, but in a language that the human vocal chords cannot replicate. Which is why people believe that madmen hum--it is as close as they can get, after being driven mad by the creature's song.
You begin to hear the Rusalka singing down the street...then in the apartment upstairs...then across the family room...then, finally, you wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that you just heard it an inch from your ear, the music trickling through an opening you can't close...
Origins: As its name indicates, it has its roots in Slavic water spirits. But the nature of the creature has grown and changed drastically since British diplomats brought tales of it home with them from the Russian Empire.
REGENERATING MEN
This one is as basic and as fucking disgusting as it comes. What we’ve got here is a creature that force-feeds its victims parts of itself. Mostly its limbs, but there is a truly hideous account of one of these creatures forcing a victim to eat its tongue out of its mouth.
Each time it does, the missing body part grows back, always more twisted and gangrenous than its predecessor. The story goes that the monster is trying to be eaten out of existence. The creatures are said to keep to the forests, and to lurk under bridges and at crossroads. The limb consumption often functions as a toll of sorts.
Origins: these tales originated in France (where the troubling accusation of cannibalism never seems to quite disappear), but they’ve crossed the Channel to Britain and from there to the New World.
Monsters Visibly Effected By Entropy (Read: Disturbed Silhouettes, Could Pass For Human.)
FACELESS MEN
Exactly what they sound like. Amorphous black figures, vaguely human-shaped, topped with a head as smooth and pale and featureless as an egg. These aren’t violent monsters, they just...well, I suppose (to put it in Internet terms), they function a lot like Slenderman. Except, you know, Slenderman when he’s not gathering up organs and shit, because there is nothing less scary than an otherworldly creature who’s interested in your pancreas.
Faceless men never hurt people, or assault them in any way. They simply appear near people, in dark corners, at the ends of streets, in complete daylight--it doesn’t matter. They are only visible to one person at a time, and simply...exist. Always there. Always turning their earless, eyeless heads to track you across the room. Perfectly silent. The story goes that victims kill themselves to escape that constant scrutiny, and take the people they care about with them. Wives, children, brothers, sisters, friends...To protect them, you see.
Origins: They are the oldest monsters on this list, hailing from the Eastern Roman Empire, where they functioned as anti-icons.*
* “Anti-icons? What are--?” OH I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED. What you've got are icons, right? And there are several degrees of icons. Like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but holier. You have the icons that are known as Acheiropoieta, which are icons that have come into being through miraculous means, and are the exact images of the saints they depict. So an Acheiropoieta of Mary would be, for all intents and purposes, Mary. And after that, you have the icons that are copies of acheiropoieta, and then icons that are copies of the copies and so on. Each gets less holy as it goes. Faceless men serve as the antithesis of the acheiropoieta, specifically. If the acheiropoieta are holiness, then the faceless men are like...black holes of holiness. Sucking it in and destroying it. The power of icons lies in the power of the image, and the faceless men have no image.
STARVING MEN
An ever-starving, ever-skeletal man whose mouth is pinned shut, stalking the Black Forest since time immemorial. But a story this good is re-told all over Europe and the New World.
He tears people to shreds and attempts to push their remains into his stitched-shut mouth, leaving gore smeared all over his face. He attracts flies, and will often have maggots writhing in the chunks of his victims’ flesh still tuck between his fingers.
His victims always smell him before they see him.
Origins: like I said, the Black Forest. The first example of a starving man story was discovered in an illuminated Bohemian bestiary dating from the tenth century.
HEADLESS MEN
The best example of the disturbed silhouette. Perfectly silent, and capable of standing motionless for days, Headless Men don’t ever exist in cities. Instead they creep in the long grass between the edge of the woods and the side of the road.
They’re children-stealers, hunting in packs, and it’s said that they want them for their teeth. Only baby teeth, though. Once a child loses all of theirs, they’re safe, and the headless men lose interest. But until then...
Origins: our very first colonial monster! They come from the northern colonies, around Virginia, but the creatures are well-known all the way to New France.
Monsters Invisibly Effected by Entropy (Or: Monsters Among Us)
This is the tough one, because the inhabitants of this category aren’t exactly monsters. They’re people like homosexuals, madmen, and--most importantly--illusionists.
The world of Gilded Souls is not, in many ways, an enlightened one. Most forms of social justice are viewed as enemies of Tradition, which is believed to be one of the few things preventing the civilized world from plunging into chaos and ruin. Unfortunately, Tradition is not kind to the mentally ill, homosexuals, or women. Discussing the ways in which these groups are othered (in a monstrous sense) is another post entirely, but-- Here, this says a lot: legends often give monsters stereotypical qualities of these marginalized people in order to make them more horrifying to the audience.
But I will only explore magicians as monsters here, because, unlike the aforementioned groups, illusionists are seen both as monsters and as the creators of monsters.
As monsters, they are deeply, fundamentally wrong, full of those gaps that people dread. Entropy uses them as conduits, and, most horrifying, they look exactly like everyone else. It is impossible to sort out who is an illusionist, and who isn’t, and there are records of popes ordering entire cities destroyed in the search for a few magicians, with the idea that God would know his own and sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Magicians also function as creators of monsters, directly and indirectly. They are the ones who spread entropy with their art, and thus make it possible for monsters to exist, but there are also many, many accounts of magicians controlling monsters, or creating them outright. For example, golem stories have a shit-ton of staying power in Gilded Souls, as does the Faust legend, though the poor bastard never gets redeemed in any of the retellings.
Illusionists, of course, can’t create monsters that can physically harm a human being, but as you can see from some of the creatures I have in the list up there, you don’t necessarily have to be touched by a monster for it to fuck you up. In addition, the nature of the created monster is in direct relation to how good an illusionist is at what he or she does. Imagine you’re a magician: it would be far easier to create a Starving Man that pops out of the woods for a few seconds than it would be to concentrate on keeping up the illusion of a Faceless Man for weeks and weeks, long enough for the victim to be driven mad. The former is difficult (conjuring up the illusion of a living thing always is), but it’s doable. Accomplishing the latter would take heaps of raw talent and a desire to essentially break someone’s sanity for shits and giggles. Luckily, most magicians are not colossal dicks, so this doesn’t happen a whole lot.
But in the end, that doesn’t help. Magicians retain the stigma of being both monsters, and the manufacturers of monstrosity, a guy who could be sitting next to you on the bus, and you’d never fucking know.
And in the end, that uncertainty is more terrifying than any monster.
+
If you hang around this journal at all, you know it was bound to happen. This won't hurt a bit.
MONSTERS AND MONSTROSITY IN THE WORLD OF GILDED SOULS
The Nature of the Beast
The mentality behind monsters in Gilded Souls is the same mentality which fosters fashion with an obsessive emphasis on openings and edges, and keeps abstract expressionism from really existing as an artistic movement. (Both of which I will expound upon in later posts, if that’s your bag.) Across the globe, societies place great emphasis on where people end, and the rest of the world begins, fostering a fear of gaps, places in our bodies and the defenses of our minds which are open, and can thus be easily breached by outside forces.
Now, quickly, before we go any further: in our own world, the ~real world~, we often create monsters in order to patrol the borders of reality. For example, if I can get all Anglo-Saxon on you for a moment, Grendel is described early in Beowulf as a “mearcstapa”. Now, a “mearc” is a limit or a boundary, and thanks to how hilariously consistent English can sometimes be, you can probably pick out the meaning of “mearcstapa” for yourself. Grendel is a “border-walker” or a “boundary-stepper”, a creature who stands as a marker at the very edge of the world.
However, that concept would be anathema in Gilded Souls. Monsters are not meant to stay on the borders. They are meant to stay out. Boundaries are there for a reason, damn it, and their first duty is to keep monstrosities and wild entropic forces (which are often one and the same) away from the soft fleshy chewability that is the human race. If a monster is walking the border, the thought goes, it is because the border is broken.
But let’s be honest. You’re not here for the smatterings of Old English and monster theory. You’re here because you want to know what’s hiding under the bed in Gilded Souls. Before we hit you with a shot of that though, I need to explain what constitutes a monster in this world Aria and I have created.
Monsters are the creatures that:
-exploit naturally occurring gaps in the human body/mind
-are visibly effected by the entropic nature of the world*
-or, conversely, are invisibly effected by the entropic nature of the world
*creatures who exhibit no distinction between themselves and the outside world also fall under this heading.
Any one of these traits (or a combination of several) is enough to set up one scary motherfucker. And so, because bullet points are delicious and bite-sized, we can break down those three points into three different kinds of monsters. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and none of these these points necessarily exclude one another (except, of course, for the last two), but it’s a nice neat way to do an overview.
And yeah, yeah, I know, no pictures. Which is weird for me. But I don't want to have to find visual approximations of these creatures. I want you to use your imaginations.
So. Make sure your closet door is tightly shut, your collar is pulled up to your chin, and that your mouth isn’t hanging open. Here we go.
Monsters Who Exploit Naturally-Occurring Gaps
RUSALKI
Key thing about the Rusalka. No one has any idea what it looks like. There is rarely a description of it in the stories, and if there is, it varies widely from telling to telling. But rest assured, it’s never, ever beautiful.
The singing, however, is. And it’s the one thing that everyone agrees upon. The creature doesn’t have a voice, really, instead it simply...sings music. An enchanting melody that some say has words, but in a language that the human vocal chords cannot replicate. Which is why people believe that madmen hum--it is as close as they can get, after being driven mad by the creature's song.
You begin to hear the Rusalka singing down the street...then in the apartment upstairs...then across the family room...then, finally, you wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that you just heard it an inch from your ear, the music trickling through an opening you can't close...
Origins: As its name indicates, it has its roots in Slavic water spirits. But the nature of the creature has grown and changed drastically since British diplomats brought tales of it home with them from the Russian Empire.
REGENERATING MEN
This one is as basic and as fucking disgusting as it comes. What we’ve got here is a creature that force-feeds its victims parts of itself. Mostly its limbs, but there is a truly hideous account of one of these creatures forcing a victim to eat its tongue out of its mouth.
Each time it does, the missing body part grows back, always more twisted and gangrenous than its predecessor. The story goes that the monster is trying to be eaten out of existence. The creatures are said to keep to the forests, and to lurk under bridges and at crossroads. The limb consumption often functions as a toll of sorts.
Origins: these tales originated in France (where the troubling accusation of cannibalism never seems to quite disappear), but they’ve crossed the Channel to Britain and from there to the New World.
Monsters Visibly Effected By Entropy (Read: Disturbed Silhouettes, Could Pass For Human.)
FACELESS MEN
Exactly what they sound like. Amorphous black figures, vaguely human-shaped, topped with a head as smooth and pale and featureless as an egg. These aren’t violent monsters, they just...well, I suppose (to put it in Internet terms), they function a lot like Slenderman. Except, you know, Slenderman when he’s not gathering up organs and shit, because there is nothing less scary than an otherworldly creature who’s interested in your pancreas.
Faceless men never hurt people, or assault them in any way. They simply appear near people, in dark corners, at the ends of streets, in complete daylight--it doesn’t matter. They are only visible to one person at a time, and simply...exist. Always there. Always turning their earless, eyeless heads to track you across the room. Perfectly silent. The story goes that victims kill themselves to escape that constant scrutiny, and take the people they care about with them. Wives, children, brothers, sisters, friends...To protect them, you see.
Origins: They are the oldest monsters on this list, hailing from the Eastern Roman Empire, where they functioned as anti-icons.*
* “Anti-icons? What are--?” OH I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED. What you've got are icons, right? And there are several degrees of icons. Like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but holier. You have the icons that are known as Acheiropoieta, which are icons that have come into being through miraculous means, and are the exact images of the saints they depict. So an Acheiropoieta of Mary would be, for all intents and purposes, Mary. And after that, you have the icons that are copies of acheiropoieta, and then icons that are copies of the copies and so on. Each gets less holy as it goes. Faceless men serve as the antithesis of the acheiropoieta, specifically. If the acheiropoieta are holiness, then the faceless men are like...black holes of holiness. Sucking it in and destroying it. The power of icons lies in the power of the image, and the faceless men have no image.
STARVING MEN
An ever-starving, ever-skeletal man whose mouth is pinned shut, stalking the Black Forest since time immemorial. But a story this good is re-told all over Europe and the New World.
He tears people to shreds and attempts to push their remains into his stitched-shut mouth, leaving gore smeared all over his face. He attracts flies, and will often have maggots writhing in the chunks of his victims’ flesh still tuck between his fingers.
His victims always smell him before they see him.
Origins: like I said, the Black Forest. The first example of a starving man story was discovered in an illuminated Bohemian bestiary dating from the tenth century.
HEADLESS MEN
The best example of the disturbed silhouette. Perfectly silent, and capable of standing motionless for days, Headless Men don’t ever exist in cities. Instead they creep in the long grass between the edge of the woods and the side of the road.
They’re children-stealers, hunting in packs, and it’s said that they want them for their teeth. Only baby teeth, though. Once a child loses all of theirs, they’re safe, and the headless men lose interest. But until then...
Origins: our very first colonial monster! They come from the northern colonies, around Virginia, but the creatures are well-known all the way to New France.
Monsters Invisibly Effected by Entropy (Or: Monsters Among Us)
This is the tough one, because the inhabitants of this category aren’t exactly monsters. They’re people like homosexuals, madmen, and--most importantly--illusionists.
The world of Gilded Souls is not, in many ways, an enlightened one. Most forms of social justice are viewed as enemies of Tradition, which is believed to be one of the few things preventing the civilized world from plunging into chaos and ruin. Unfortunately, Tradition is not kind to the mentally ill, homosexuals, or women. Discussing the ways in which these groups are othered (in a monstrous sense) is another post entirely, but-- Here, this says a lot: legends often give monsters stereotypical qualities of these marginalized people in order to make them more horrifying to the audience.
But I will only explore magicians as monsters here, because, unlike the aforementioned groups, illusionists are seen both as monsters and as the creators of monsters.
As monsters, they are deeply, fundamentally wrong, full of those gaps that people dread. Entropy uses them as conduits, and, most horrifying, they look exactly like everyone else. It is impossible to sort out who is an illusionist, and who isn’t, and there are records of popes ordering entire cities destroyed in the search for a few magicians, with the idea that God would know his own and sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Magicians also function as creators of monsters, directly and indirectly. They are the ones who spread entropy with their art, and thus make it possible for monsters to exist, but there are also many, many accounts of magicians controlling monsters, or creating them outright. For example, golem stories have a shit-ton of staying power in Gilded Souls, as does the Faust legend, though the poor bastard never gets redeemed in any of the retellings.
Illusionists, of course, can’t create monsters that can physically harm a human being, but as you can see from some of the creatures I have in the list up there, you don’t necessarily have to be touched by a monster for it to fuck you up. In addition, the nature of the created monster is in direct relation to how good an illusionist is at what he or she does. Imagine you’re a magician: it would be far easier to create a Starving Man that pops out of the woods for a few seconds than it would be to concentrate on keeping up the illusion of a Faceless Man for weeks and weeks, long enough for the victim to be driven mad. The former is difficult (conjuring up the illusion of a living thing always is), but it’s doable. Accomplishing the latter would take heaps of raw talent and a desire to essentially break someone’s sanity for shits and giggles. Luckily, most magicians are not colossal dicks, so this doesn’t happen a whole lot.
But in the end, that doesn’t help. Magicians retain the stigma of being both monsters, and the manufacturers of monstrosity, a guy who could be sitting next to you on the bus, and you’d never fucking know.
And in the end, that uncertainty is more terrifying than any monster.
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