It seems somehow appropriate to discuss this on April Fool's Day.

Joseph Campbell was a Mythologist - a student of mythology, and to some extent, comparative religion. He became famous for popularizing the concept that all myths - all stories, really - are simply variations on The One Story. That is to say, that there's a certain framework that all myths fall into, which is a way of showing the fundamental psychological interconnectedness of all things blah blah blah blah. It's the kind of thing that wild-eyed accademics in the mid-19th century went even wilder-eyed about because it's basically reductive thinking: It turns big, scary, inscrutable, and generally (Gasp!) non-Caucasian societies into something you can dismiss with a wave of your pseudointellectual hand. The beauty of this is that it allows white folks to tell non-white folks what non-white folks believe and think without ever botheirng to ask them, nor even considering their opinions in the first place.

hi there everyone. sorry for the gregor samsa-styled typing, but i hurt my finger the other day.

When science fiction wants to be taken seriously its practitioners talk about how sci fi is metaphor for what ever the writer is trying to portray to the reader or watcher in the case of TV. Aliens are minority groups; zombies are chaos or death, etc. The same is true for the alien invasion story since its first famous rendering in H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’ to the current ‘V’ TV series this has been true.

I have found myself mentioning and recommending an anime called ‘Neo Genesis Evangelion’ (NGE for short) on this site almost every time the subject of anime comes up. I have just realized that I should probably write a little article about the show, and why I think some people should watch what's undoubtedly one of my favorite anime series of all time. (I also need to warn people that the subject matter is not for everyone. There is no overt nudity - but there is fan service- the violence is not too over-the-top, but it would be rated PG or PG-13 by our standards.