What would a social media feed be without monsters?
Despite their awfulness, we cant go without them.
God created the world and its inhabitants, and therefore created monsters.
Why would he create monsters, though?
Monsters usually represent the dark side of the world, sins against Christian virtues.
40% off TNW Conference!
They might not be outwardly as atrocious, but the qualities ascribed to them serve the same role.
Ironically, the way I bumped into this parallel was on Twitter.
Johanna Green, highlight the beauty and fine detail of the illustrations.
Hes not exaggerating when saying wacky.
He didnt, luckily, but he did tell me more about the functions monsters served in the books.
I do not think there can be a single, definite answer to it.
Depictions of monsters often appear in the margins of the page.
They constitute a world of their own.
Ok, so that checks out.
Again, that checks out if you replace Christian ideals with neoliberal surveillance capitalism.
We lose 300 Americans a week, 90% of which comes through the Southern Border.
These numbers will be DRASTICALLY REDUCED if we have a Wall!
Or maybe just to make their neighbors laugh?
To what purpose are those unclean apes, those fierce lions, those monstrous centaurs, those half-men…
But for us modern humans, the appeal is easier to pinpoint.
It is not necessary to be an art historian of the Middle Ages to appreciate them.
Kempf agrees with that last bit.
And a wide public it is indeed, clocking in at close 100,000 followers over Twitter and Instagram.
To Kempf, the appeal is obvious.
The weirder the image, the better it works, generally.
There are even some medieval monsters that are symbolically relevant to our age in quite different ways.
Youve probably seen medieval Yoda, which was found by Kempf.
Now, the very process of defining the other helps the construction of ones own identity.
Who am I in relation to someone else, the other?
Which brings us back to the monsters in our feed.
Or will they see how we respond to our monsters and take that into account?
Id like to believe we have a measure of control over how well be characterized in the future.
We are all the monks painting our monsters now.
In the relentless onslaught of news cycles its hard to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Its also hard to zoom in and see things for what they are.
