The New Yorker:

For most of human history, monsters were repugnant aberrations, breaches of the natural and moral order. What’s behind our relentless urge to humanize them?

By Manvir Singh

Something’s going on with our monsters. They used to feast on humans with abandon, burn our villages, prowl the margins of the map; now they’re seeking therapy. The fangs are still there, but they’re clenched in pain. Killing sprees have become cries for help; horns and scales are mere markers of identity. These creatures aren’t out to destroy the world; they’re just trying to find their place in it.

Consider sea monsters, perhaps the oldest terrors in world literature. Tiamat, the Babylonian chaos goddess, embodied the primordial ocean. She spawned a brood of abominations—snakes, beasts, scorpion-men—before the divine champion Marduk smashed her skull and made the world from her dismembered body. Leviathan, of the Hebrew Bible, spat fire and churned the sea like boiling soup in a cauldron. Even into the twentieth century, the ocean coughed up colossi, none more famous than the king of monsters himself, Godzilla. Yet in the past decade sea demons have gone from menaces to misfits. In Pixar’s “Luca,” they’re cute kids yearning for sunlight. DreamWorks’ Ruby Gillman is a teen-age kraken who just wants to survive high school. The amphibian man of Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is a gentle romantic.

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