My Sources and Where to Read/Watch Them

I’m extremely grateful for everyone who’s enjoyed the first story—both those who felt it resonated like the medieval stories it’s based on, and those unfamiliar with them who liked it nonetheless!

If you’re in that second group, maybe I’ve even piqued your curiosity. Either way, we’re dealing with something a little harder to get ahold of than, say, Greek mythology, and whose public perception is a lot more fraught with misconceptions, especially online; a lot of stuff that purports to be “ancient Irish myth” is mostly the product of its author’s imagination, and there’s nothing wrong with a good retelling (I’m practically doing that myself), but it can be a problem when people don’t admit that’s what they’re doing. At the same time, I’ve seen some people enjoy this entirely on the strength of their interest in Irish legend without being familiar with Kamen Rider, which I was less anticipating since so much of my personal social circles are tokusatsu fans, so I guess I’d better introduce that too.

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The Ulster Cycle

So: The “Ulster cycle” is a modern term for categorising stories written in medieval Ireland chronicling the exploits of the legendary heroes of Ulster around the 1^st century and their contemporaries; characters you may have heard of include Cú Chulainn and Queen Medb (there are other groupings, such as the “Finn cycle”, for other time periods). They began to be written down in maybe the 7^th century, and the tradition remained continuously active right through the early modern period. They are very unlikely to provide authentic information about anyone who actually lived in the 1^st century, but they do contain certain very old elements. Some of these elements being pre-Christian means that when people talk about “Irish mythology”, this corpus of literature is what they usually mean. This is the part most subject to misinformation and misconception, because it’s more complicated situation than the likes of a single tweet can sum up; if Cú Chulainn is the son of Lugh, pretty certainly a one-time deity, but Cú Chulainn himself likely takes shape later due to influence from Classical heroes of the Trojan war (Christian Ireland loved it some Greco-Roman classics), is it appropriate to call him a “demigod”? Exercise for the reader.

Leaving aside academic questions, what is the Ulster cycle like? Well, as I hope to have conveyed in the Exile, it’s about the fascinating collision between an overblown honour-code and a mindset we can only really describe as “dudes rock”. There’s a lot of doing bad or foolish or destructive things because the alternative would mean to lose face, and a lot of terrible things that didn’t need to happen but for stubborn pride and the pursuit of glory. The heroes’ martial prowess and energy, to the delight of anime fans everywhere, manifests in long lists of named special moves, absurd hyper-violence, and even a palpable aura of heat and light. And sometimes it’s just very funny.

If you are interested in reading the stories, technically a large number of them can be found here (the first of which is where I colour-picked the background for my story documents, which I hoped would be comfortingly familiar for aficionados):

https://celt.ucc.ie/publishd.html

http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/index_irish.html

But I would caution against just jumping into these. The stories are provided without context, or with introductions from very outdated scholarship as these are generally quite old translations, and they aren’t sorted chronologically (either in-story or of composition); it’s just a repository of hundreds of medieval Irish texts. Among CELT’s contents are two (quite different) versions of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the big central tale of the Ulster cycle, sometimes nicknamed the “Irish Iliad”; this can be read on its own, but as most of the cycle is at least partly building it up, I would suggest it reads better when you have more of that context. (If you do want to read it, there are two more recent translations in print--both somewhat combining the two versions--by Thomas Kinsella and Ciaran Carson)

In my opinion, a better introduction would be the story I gleefully stole from for my tale of Za Salou’s calf, that being Mac Da Tho’s Pig, which handily has a solid translation online complete with links to a glossary:

http://adminstaff.vassar.edu/sttaylor/MacDatho/

It’s a relatively simple tale that handily demonstrates the macho posturing culture we’re dealing with, and is also just a lot of fun.

You could also try and track down a copy of Jeffrey Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas, which includes several Ulster cycle stories, as well as some interesting “mythological cycle” stories. It does leave out some sections (usually minor, except in the case of The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, a story I’ll probably come back to for a future instalment) that are particularly difficult to translate, but the quality of prose is generally better than the older translations in the public domain.

Meanwhile if you prefer audio format, I highly recommend Guth, a podcast by Dr Emmet Taylor, the same Celticist scholar I thanked in my acknowledgements:

https://www.youtube.com/@Guth-Podcast

Here they do readings of publicly-available translations of medieval Irish stories, and often add some very useful insights on what’s going on in the stories at the end. So far they have covered three Ulster cycle stories, including the aforementioned Mac Da Tho’s Pig, and a text that I will be heavily drawing on for the second Gordian cycle story, The Wooing of Emer. (Beyond this, I would be very careful in terms of Youtube content relating to Irish legends. Some of it is by weird racists.)

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Kamen Rider

So tokusatsu or “special effects” is a genre of Japanese TV and movies that broadly encompasses kaiju, such as Godzilla, and superheroes, such as Super Sentai (y’know, the show they take footage from to make Power Rangers).

1971’s Kamen Rider is one of the latter; it follows a motorcyclist kidnapped by an evil secret neo-Nazi organisation who seek world domination by remodelling humans into cyborg weapons. Our hero escapes before they can brainwash him, fighting his fellow cyborgs with the power they gave him, but forever cursed to feel apart from the rest of humanity now he’s half robot grasshopper.

It made enough money that there have since been over 30 Kamen Rider shows, all with their own story, cast and setting, linked primarily by aesthetic elements like transformation belts, motorcycles and flashy jump-kick finishing moves, and secondarily but still quite often by thematic ones. For instance the current season at the time of writing, Kamen Rider Gavv, is on the one hand about a guy with a second mouth on his stomach who wields the power of fruit gummies, but on the other he did still get those powers through unethical science experiments.

If you would like to see some homoerotic bug guys fighting for human freedom, this will be easier or harder depending on where you live. I’m not from the USA, but I’m aware several Kamen Rider shows are available officially there, via Shout Factory and Discotek. Otherwise, you may have to resort to other means, as fans of less mainstream anime may already be well familiar with.

As for which seasons among the mass of them I would recommend:

- If you want to specifically see what I am drawing on for the Gordian cycle, or you like old rubber-suit monster movies, the original series and its immediate sequel Kamen Rider V3 (1973), as well as the various incarnations that take a somewhat ‘edgy’ approach to its core concepts, such as Kamen Rider Black (1987) and Kamen Rider Kuuga (2000), and films like Shin Kamen Rider (2023), Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992) (no relation) (really), and...well I don’t exactly recommend Kamen Rider: The First (2005)/Next (2007) as movies, but their suits and action are incredible and definitely in my mind for this.

- Except ignore all that because what you should actually do is watch Kamen Rider ZO (1993), which is extremely good, only 40 minutes long, true to the series’ core concepts, and a dazzling display of so many different kinds of movie artistry. Frankly you can disregard the whole previous paragraph, watch ZO and get a pretty good idea of what Rider as a whole is contributing to this project (Except don’t watch it if you have arachnophobia).

- If you want some shows that might feel more familiar to modern sensibilities, Kamen Rider Ryuki (2002) influenced basically every battle royale anime since, Kamen Rider Kabuto (2006) will melt your brain, Kamen Rider OOO (2011) will make you cry over the world’s most beautiful morally-ambiguous twink gremlin, and Kamen Rider Ex-Aid (2016) is a tour de force of making nonsense work (it is about videogame doctors here to cure your virus). These are just some I personally like, though! Maybe just watch some OPs and pick one you think looks cool.

My actual favourite, 2009’s Kamen Rider Decade, is a big anniversary crossover event and probably not a good starting point. Also, a note on the original 1971 series—it is 98 episodes long, a lot longer than any other season (they didn’t know there would be multiple shows yet, so they kinda just kept making it), and whether that is a good or bad thing depends on how down you are for the 70s style of extremely episodic stories. Regardless, what I’m mostly drawing on is the tone of the first 13 episodes; after that it becomes significantly lighter and introduces a new (temporary) lead, which ended up saving the show financially. And it is fun to see the shift, so maybe watch 15 episodes or so? Well, do what you want.

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I hope one half or the other of this was useful to someone! There’ll be one more of these before I upload the second story (on which work is underway), talking specifically about how I got to Morgan from the space between Cú Chulainn and Hongo Takeshi.