*long read as this was a term paper

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Love Death + Robots is a collection of animated short stories on the popular streaming platform Netflix following themes around alternative dystopian universes, futuristic horror, science fiction thriller, creative retelling of common folklore tropes, etc. The anthology caught attention when it was released in 2019 for its creative animation styles by bringing together world-class animators, but its post-human philosophy is a common emerging theme in many genres such as Young/Adult, thriller, horror, action/adventure, drama, romance, and even some dark comedy. This paper will be speaking about emerging themes in genres only on globally accessed streaming platforms, which are saturated to a large extent by Western media or representation of ‘white culture’, and if in a fantastical setting, through white characterisation. This brand of post-human philosophy attempts to be dissociative, even if it is created for social commentary or satire, as it is a leisure activity.

There are eras that can be marked in Disney’s storytelling style based on the plot and character design of the movie and its protagonists, and my example is the story of the Florida studio. It did the backup animation since the primary Disney studios in Burbank dealt with ‘safer’ more established stories rather than entertain eccentric ideas. It was these conventional stories, most of them based on Grimm fairy tales, that created the strong foundation of the Disney empire.

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When the pervasiveness of Western media is made accessible globally, and social media supports the growth of worldwide platforms of discussion or digital interaction, it also normalises the global audiences to the Western narrative. People who regularly consume such content completely understand the message behind stereotypical American symbolism faster than they recognize the cross-cultural communication they constantly partake in, making them native speakers of a sort of language that they have never written in person due to different ground realities. Rather than dismissing the effects of the digital age, Alan Dundes in his article Who are the Folk? requests for a restructuring of the boundaries of linguistics as a discipline and to redefine the folk as a common identifying thread between multiple people (Dundes, 1980). In doing so, he extends the notion of folk groups into the digital age and informs us that folk culture is thriving once it is not seen as attributed only to the rural. 

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What that does is create folk groups based on the global connectivity, sub-folk groups based on those who subscribe to streaming platforms, and then a sub-group of those who enjoy a particular genre, lastly followed by a sub-group that watches season 2 of Love Death + Robots critically out of interest. This process of folk group creation and creation of folklore based on the differences between two or more groups has been explored in Response Paper 1. However, even if most people found one episode superior to the other, the fact remains that this group is created by audiences from all over the world, living with vastly different knowledge sets and biases. What is remarkable is that any person belonging to such a sub-group has approximately a good grasp of American symbolism to understand underlying tones, common tropes, and folklore. And the creators of the episode “All Through the House”, knowingly or unknowingly, utilized that. 

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“All Through the House” is only seven minutes long, but balances suspense and dark comedy as the plot follows two little siblings who sneak downstairs on Christmas to sneak a peek at Santa Clause only to find that it looks entirely different. Animation has long been trying to prove its superiority as a medium of creativity. It does so by conflating the subversion of stereotypically joyful traits and misleading animation style, with dark comedy and body horror that is aware of magical realism. It results in a quick but crisp display of how symbols hold enough meaning even for those who have not experienced the event that the symbol stands for. In short, even if one has never celebrated Christmas, the episode manages to convey the innocent childish joy, to confused horror, to comedic acceptance exactly on time, which is only possible if the trope is laid perfectly to be able to subvert it, and banks on the audience knowing the trope as well so that it could be subverted. 

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To uncover more multi-faceted layers of this almost-reflexive process, a closer look at another episode called “The Tall Grass” is required. At first glance, the set-up seems familiar enough as the notion of Santa Claus: a midnight steam train travelling between endless fields filled with tall grass suddenly halts and the lone awake passenger gets off the train to smoke but is tempted to enter the grass to find the mystery of the strange blue glow in the grass. The glow eludes him and in trying to find it, he gets lost to find the glow coming from a strange faceless monster. As the train sounds to depart, the passenger dodges the monsters trying to grab and eat him and make it back to the train, which the conductor helps him to do after an intense action-packed sequence, which did not seem suspenseful enough. Maybe a sign of an overused trope not redone creatively enough. 

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The twist lies when the conductor, once safely back on the train, tells the passenger his theory that the fields might be an interdimensional portal and maybe the monsters were once humans. He also says that the train stops at that precise spot at every crossing, and the passenger realizes the glow is increasing in the fields and the scene cuts to an end. On a surface level, this new addition to what exactly are the monsters seems to provide some originality to the concept but largely falls flat. It is strange that the concept seems familiar to the point of being boring to the global audience watching that show because while the trope may be global, the imagery is based on a digital folklore trend called ‘Midwestern Gothic’ which is based on certain traits of the geographical region of midwestern USA.

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Regional gothic started out as a meme on a social media site called tumblr.com and using a type of literary genre (online dialects that format a text in certain ways so that the online community can understand the intention of the text before they even read the content) that exaggerates local issues of some geographic areas to give it a trademark intrinsic eerie feeling, according to a Medium article called “How Regional Gothic Romanticises American Culture” (Smith, 2020). A helpful Venn diagram chart on the blog shows the examples of Regional Gothic with Midwestern Gothic being characterised with “cornfields (and the monsters therein)”, “highways and empty gas stations” “nature and poverty as forces of isolation”, “deer horror” (referring to the horror trope of being hunted by monsters after having left vehicle to inspect roadkill), and “the Christian religion as a source of fear”. 

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While some of the themes mentioned above are simply a result of a complex history of socio-political issues, such as “the Christian religion as a source of fear” and “nature and poverty as forces of isolation”, the rest are simply a product of the earlier issues mentioned. These issues, when left unmanaged, could produce a certain feeling while in a liminal space that people are quick to attribute to the geographical region. As soon as the abstract version of this emotion is put online in the form of an obscure eerie picture, it adds layers of  abstraction in simplifying the temporally complex historical narrative into a present-day emotion, and then into a random image linked to a gothic theme by a hashtag. The original issue gets further abstracted and glamorized, making it harder to address from the roots, and thereby only increasing the aesthetic rhetoric of the image. 
 

In a sense, these pictures are looking at an example of deep structural fault in governance or sociality or religious/medical institutions, even service providers, but to use its likeness to render a feeling of helplessness, rather than addressing the cause. This feeling of helplessness is seen to be aesthetic during an age when most media consumption naturally follows the theme of dystopic horror. This is how a very real place with real problems and consequences is romanticized and the image becomes a part of digital urban folklore. Now that the image is on a global platform, people who have never experienced the reality of living in such places are made to feel as if they are familiar with this place and associate it with claustrophobia, irrational fear, and danger. And this process is utilized by the cinematic trope of a ‘cornfield maze’. 

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While this can and should be enjoyed at the level of internet humour, many people are basing their assumptions on what these places are like because of such exaggerations, rendering these places a completely passive role in their own narrative. The responsibility of a first impression for someone who is having access to these stories because of online genres and platforms but not because they belong to this locality, lies with the creators of the second-narrative, as put by Katherine Borland in that’s what I said by That Is Not What I Said: Interpretative Conflict in Oral Narrative Research as mentioned in Synthesis 2 paper (Borland). 

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So, the episode “The Tall Grass” counted as horror because the monsters shown were called human, which was fleeting recognition that was horrifyingly swept away with the “Best to keep this to yourself- no one will believe you anyway” line that the episode ends with. This counts as horror because if one were to finally not ignore the historical-political concept, then the metaphor talks about very real religious and racial persecution, communal violence and the belief that such behaviour is justified, which still persists in some of these areas today. Except the internet humour hardly helps fix the root cause for such violence, instead normalises strangers to it.

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Both the episodes were classic examples of regional folktales turned horror, except Tall Grass made a point by appearing to be unaware of the implications of connecting such imagery to the genre on a global platform accessible to all. Which brings the prevalence of a genre such as dystopic horror into the frame as well. Not only does it use the theme of dubious ethics and consent in the rapidly advancing world of technology, but also mirrors a deep-rooted mistrust in authority figures due to changing global political climates. This often results in the polarization of a folk group and when chances of communication fall through, it usually results in violence, which is also a theme in dystopic horror. 

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According to the point made by Alan Dundes, there is an incredible amount of folk art being generated once digital communities are counted as folk groups. The digital realm should stop being discarded as inferior to physical interaction and be used as an opportunity for globally spread communities to communicate in a more active tone with each other. And to create occasions of celebrating digital folk art and celebrating digital folk groups through it. After all, a found family of misfits usually stop the dystopic horror from worsening in most stories, even the subversive ones. 

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References 

• Borland, K. (n.d.). 'That's not what I said': Interpretative conflict in oral narrative research. Interpreting Memories, 320-332. 

• Dundes, A. (1980). Who Are The Folk? Interpreting Folklore, 0-18. 

• Smith, K. (2020, November 29). How Regional Gothic Romantices American Culture. Retrieved from medium.com:https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-regional-gothic-romanticizes-american-cultu re-7936643e24cf

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