A Kaiju Primer for City of the Gods

​My recently re-released novel, City of the Gods is meant to be a love letter to kaiju media but this kind of story is fairly uncommon in fiction. Kaiju is mostly a cinematic genre and I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the great giant monster stories that were an influence on my book while I was writing it and a couple of notable entries which were released in the fifteen years since.

Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One, 2023

You can’t talk about kaiju without talking about Godzilla, while it’s not the only game in town, the series originated the genre as we know it today and continues to dominate it. As of this writing there have been 38 films in the over 70 year-old series and it is actually going stronger than ever with both an American-produced cinematic universe with multiple films and television series and a revitalized Japanese film series, which won its first Academy Award for the terrific Godzilla Minus One, due to get a sequel later this year and even other Japanese films in development.

From Godzilla 2000, 1999

I’m sure you can look at the seventy year old series and find lots of similarities to my book from the decision to give Quetzalcoatl an oceanic resting place so he could come ashore like Godzilla, to his battles with a UFO not unlike Godzilla 2000, to his tussle with a multi-headed opponent. There are tons of homages to the series but probably the Godzilla movies that were the biggest influences on City of the Gods were 1991’s Godzilla vs King Ghidorah and 2001’s Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. While not the first movie to introduce this concept, Godzilla Final Wars from 2004, famously featured kaiju used by aliens as weapons of mass destruction against humanity, much as is the case in COTG.

Like COTG, Godzilla vs King Ghidorah involves UFO aliens who have a seemingly benevolent agenda. Also like COTG, it is a time-travel Kaiju story, which was unprecedented when the movie was released and still uncommon. In fact, Godzilla's origin in GvKG revolves around a time loop. It's a pretty unique movie in the series. While the writing of COTG is a bit of a blur to me, as lover of time travel stories I would not have been able to resist including this element in my book and GvKG  certainly opened the door to do so in this genre. So, you know, blame them if you didn't like the book.

Whereas the previous movie has a definite sci-fi angle on Godzilla, Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack (which will hereby be referred to as GMK for obvious reasons) takes a more mystical view of the genre with all of the title monsters being akin to nature spirits and Godzilla himself being a manifestation of Japan’s war-time dead. While the movie has no real plot points in common with COTG, the film's mysticism, grandeur, and vibe were all an influence on the book since GMK is widely considered to be among the best of the Godzilla series. Like the guardian monsters who rise to oppose Godzilla in the movie, Quetzalcoatl rises to defend Mexico (and also the Earth) from the Nahuan invaders.

From Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris

Before he was granted directing duties on GMK, director Shusuke Kaneko cut his teeth on a trilogy of movies in the 1990’s featuring Godzilla’s main cinematic rival, Gamera. Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, Gamera 2: Legion, and Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris tell the story of a turtle-esque kaiju created by an ancient civilization who serves as a guardian of Earth against a series of giant monsters. This depiction of Gamera was a big influence on the way Quetzalcoatl is written in COTG. Both kaiju occupy a similar position in the spectrum of villainous destruction (Say GMK Godzilla or Shin Godzilla) to mindless animal (1998 Godzilla) to antihero (Legendary Godzilla) to cuddly pal (Showa Gamera and late Showa Godzilla). Both kaiju are tough-as-nails brawlers who are reluctant defenders of humanity or at least the Earth. I also just love these movies and think they are among the best in the genre.

Another notable entry in the genre was 2008's Cloverfield a rare "found footage" kaiju movie. This American feature film gives the audience a full first-person perspective on a giant monster attack. The horror and immediacy of the movie was certainly something I had in mind when I was writing COTG, specifically the scenes of Eddie on the ground during Coatlicue's attack on the city.

A few years after the release of City of the Gods the landmark kaiju-versus-mecha epic Pacific Rim was released. The movie was directed by Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro (also my fantasy pick for directing duties on a prospective COTG film, if anyone cares) who is no stranger to genre films (a couple  of them have been featured on Monster Movie of the Week). While there is not too much in common plotwise between City of the Gods and Pacific Rim (other than a similar kaiju birth scene) but I'm intrigued by the film's reputation. It has been called alternately the "smartest dumb movie ever made" and the "dumbest smart movie ever made," which is backhanded praise but speaks to how we look at this genre and the contradictions inherent in an auteur like del Toro making a "silly monster versus robot" movie that takes itself less than seriously. The result is an often ridiculous film made with a lot of meticulous attention to detail and artistry that you don't often see in the genre, which are often made by talented journeymen directors. I like to think that mix of silliness and thoughtfulness is at play in COTG, which for all its big dumb action set pieces, has a distinct point-point-of-view and things to say about the world and history.

Shin Godzilla, 2016

A lot of Godzilla movies in the twenty-first century have had a notable vein of seriousness to them. The first of the American movies, 2014's Godzilla is a fairly somber affair in which the kaiju action largely takes a backseat to the human drama. The Japanese series relaunched in 2016 with Shin Godzilla, a new take on Godzilla that is more grounded and scarier than traditional Godzilla fare. While the American movies went into a more action-oriented and fun direction, the Japanese films doubled down on human drama in the acclaimed and Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, which is nothing short of a post-war drama set wrapped around a kaiju movie.

Thankfully the addition of King Kong to the Legendary movies, starting with his own movie 2017's Kong: Skull Island, has reintroduced an element of levity to the franchise. Both Godzilla v. Kong and Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire are incredibly fun examples of the genre featuring unexpected humor, great characterization, and sometimes surprising action.

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Has Star Trek Become Woke?

​The term woke is derived from African American colloquial English to describe a state of social awareness, being conscious of the realities of social injustice in the world and particularly in American culture. Its usage was not unlike the way it is used in Buddhism. The title of Buddha literally means “Awakened one.” It was a good, meaningful word. However, in recent years, right-wing commentators have co-opted it to describe any piece of media that prominently features women, LGBT people, or people of color. The argument seems to be that when a piece of media features anything other than heterosexual white men, it is promoting a “social agenda,” instead of simply showing an accurate reflection of the world we live in, which features lots of other people in addition to heterosexual white men.

A Ghostbusters movie with a female cast? Woke. A Marvel movie featuring three female leads, two of which are women of color and a black female director? Woke. A Star Wars series with a black female lead and queer female director? WOKE. She-Hulk? She’s mean to men. Woke. Black stormtrooper? Woke. Black mermaid? What do you call that? Woke. A Lesbian side character in an animated movie? Too woke. Superman-just being Superman? Why is it so woke?!

In recent years, Star Trek has returned to its serial television roots with a handful of shows on Paramount+. Those have been a mixed bag with some real highlights and some lowlights. The flagship show for this run was Star Trek: Discovery which ultimately gave us our first black female captain (leading a series anyway) and (unbelievably) it was our first show with openly queer characters. Of course, given the political climate, the usual insecure and terminally online people cried “woke” but calling Star Trek woke belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the property which has always promoted at least Liberalism and certainly diversity. Star Trek has always had a social agenda of showing us a an egalitarian, anti-colonial, post-capitalist world. It has never pretended to be anything but woke for the last sixty years.

You tell her, Data!

This was true going back to the original incarnation of Star Trek in the 1960’s which despite the presence of a swaggering American male (played by a Jewish Canadian) was remarkably diverse for the time and as the franchise continued in the 1980’s and 1990’s it seemed like the producers were actively playing Diversity Bingo with the various bridge crews if only to better reflect the diverse society that was watching these shows.

The final frontier for the new batch of shows is in the area of LGBTQ representation which had always been lacking. Queer people were effectively invisible in Star Trek for decades and there were constant teases that this or that minor character might be revealed to be gay only for the producers to chicken out or be blocked by the studio. The first canonically gay character on Star Trek was the alt-universe Sulu in the JJ Abrams-produced Kelvin trilogy, although the openly gay original Sulu actor George Takei was not necessarily on board with that juxtaposition of his on and offscreen life.

Star Trek: Discovery not only gave us a gay science officer in the form of Paul Stamets but gave him a husband who was the ship’s medical officer (and a Latino for your Bingo card) they show even threw in a Lesbian engineer for good measure. In retrospect, not having Lesbian engineers on all those other ships seems terribly unsafe. In later seasons, the show introduced a transmale and a Non-Binary character. And if recent years have shown us anything, it’s that trans and Non-Binary people are catnip for right-wing dickheads, earning Discovery the dreaded woke label.

To run the risk of being overly fair to idiots, if you squint, Discovery was woker than most other Trek shows in that it sometimes eschewed Star Trek’s allegory to more explicitly tie into the progressive politics of the moment. Only time will tell how that will age the show. In fifteen years, the Stacey Abrams cameo as the President of the Federation might seem like a strange curiosity of the 2020’s.

And new we are onto a new show with the launch of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a direct spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery featuring a young and diverse cast (including the most beautiful Klingon man I’ve ever seen) and the boys who cried woke are at it again not even two episodes in. So far they are nitpicking (get ready) the way that the captain played by Holly Hunter sits in her chair.

Look, Star Trek is, and always will be, woke. The non-woke version of Star Trek would be, I don’t know, a show set on an Imperial Star Destroyer. If you think it’s too woke, I have a mirror universe that you might enjoy emigrating to but please keep Star Trek out of your silly political BS.

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The Mandalorian, Season 1

The first season of The Mandalorian is kind of a miracle: it was a new Star Wars project that was widely-liked and uncontroversial (not counting the nostalgic sugar rush that was The Force Awakens release) among the famously fickle fans of the franchise. Iron Man director and Star Wars: The Clone Wars showrunner Dave Filoni teamed up to deliver was is a wildly appealing and fun Star Wars concoction set about a half decade after Return of the Jedi and set un the relatively unexplored part of the Star Wars galaxy; the underbelly of criminals and bounty hunters during the New Republic period, a timeframe largely uncharted in the Disney canon (the sequel movies are set about a generation later). The show was released during a time of strife in the Star Wars fandom, shortly after the run of The Rise of Skywalker, a movie widely disliked by Star Wars fans which followed a movie which was intensely disliked by half of Star Wars fans, but to be fair, every year since 1999 has been a time of strife in Star Wars fandom. But the fans liked The Mandalorian! At least initially.

The Mandalorian in its first season is very much a simple, back-to-basics Star Wars project. Indeed, one can imagine Jon Favreau or Dave Filoni dumping out a tub of Kenner toys from The Empire Strikes Back and creating the show from old Boba Fett, Yoda, Ugnaught, Stormtroopers, Imperial Officer action figures and maybe an occasional Klatuu, IG88, ATST and X-Wing thrown in for good measure. That said, the show remixes a lot of pop culture elements that are intertwined in the Star Wars DNA such as the Space Western vibe of A New Hope and mixes it with a dash of the Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub samurai stories which had never been part of Star Wars before but feel right at home in Kurosawa-inspired world of the Galaxy Far, Far, Away and its themes of legacy and found family.

While the true origins of this show are unknown, it should be noted that there was in the early years of the Disney Star Wars era talk of a Boba Fett movie which got so far into production that it even had a director (Josh Trank) and even had Michael B. Jordan attached in some capacity. That project was one of the dozens of announced Disney projects that never made it to production and The Mandalorian followed shortly after. It is worth wondering whether this project was adapted from that film, Din Djarin, the titular character has much in common with the Original Trilogy Boba Fett: both are laconic bounty hunters only ever seen in Mandalorian armor who ride around in shambling gunships. Djarin even wields Fett's rifle used in his original Holiday Special appearance.

This would also explain the show's famously uneven pacing. Every season of The Mandalorian features a certain number of filler or "sidequest" episodes in addition to those that drive the story forward. In season one, you could essentially skip episodes four through six and not miss much regarding the core story of Mando, Grogu Gideon, and the Mandalorian clan on Nevarro. That said, those episodes are all a lot of fun but I can imagine a them having been added as part of a process of expanding a Boba Fett movie into a season of television.  This is interesting to consider as The Mandalorian makes the jump from television to movie later this year.

Despite the fact that Star Wars has been episodic television in animated form for twenty years at this point there is always a lot of discussion about where the franchise belongs and how well it "works" on TV. In fact, many of these Disney+ shows have been the subject of fan cuts (certainly nothing new for Star Wars). While the first two seasons of The Mandalorian is widely well-regarded, shows like The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and The Acolyte have been recut by talented fans to address perceived quality or pacing issues often with fascinating results.

While Din Djarin is often brought to life by a pair of stuntmen, his face and voice belong to Pedro Pascal in a role that cemented him as the go-to actor for playing protective "daddy" figures to gifted but endangered children. He voices Djarin with a terse toughness, moral decency, and occasional flashes of dry humor. He initially seems like a tough-as-nails bounty hunter in the vein of Boba Fett, he reveals additional depth when his high value quarry turns out to be an alien child. After initially turning the child over the Imperials who had contracted him, Djarin has a change of heart and rescues him cementing his status as a Good Dude.

The Child-as he was known for the first season-is, of course, Grogu, a fifty year-old alien from the same long-lived species as Yoda. Din and Grogu's first meeting ate the end of episode one is an iconic Star Wars moment, especially since it was not spoiled beforehand. The Yoda species has remained a mysterious one and George Lucas has famously refused to reveal much about them, even their name. The only other member we have seen is the Jedi Master Yaddle in The Phantom Menace and Tales of the Jedi. Like the others of his ilk, Grogu also has force powers which he uses saves Din's life on a couple of different occasions, creating a bond leading to their "Clan of Two."

Grogu is of course, adorable and the creators of The Mandalorian are very adept at coming up with genuinely cute business to occupy him. While he is often in danger, Grogu is frequently seen having a blast which is part of his charm. He also is infinitely marketable and for a while the market was flooded with all manner of Grogu dolls, apparel, and collectibles.

During the season Din Djarin meets lots of other memorable characters. Strangely the series is full of lots of 1990's Second City people like Horacio Sanz and Amy Sedaris. Nick Nolte voices the Ugnaught character Kuiil, who becomes a friend and close ally of Mando in the first season and who sadly does not continue on. Taika Waititi hilariously voices IG11, an assassin droid and rival bounty hunter to The Mandalorian. Action Legend Carl Weathers appears in a recurring role as Grief Carga, Mando's Frenemy in season one. On the villain side we have Giancarlo Esposito as a ruthless Imperial Remnant Moff, and seemingly a Vader fanboy, who has a long association with Mandalore and is revealed in the season's closing moments to be in possession of the Darksaber (more on that below). And somehow they managed to get legendary director and occasional actor Werner Herzog, to bring his distinctive Austrian rasp to the role of the mysterious Client in search of Grogu and his blood which has a high "M-count" because apparently it is too triggering for some fans to hear the word "Midichlorians."

A MANDALORIAN PRIMER

As the title implies, The Mandalorian also reveals more about one Star Wars other mysterious groups, the Mandalorians. Of course the first of these depicted in Star Wars was the aforementioned Boba Fett, and he was identified as a "Mandalorian" as far back as his creation in the late 1970's in the ancillary materials that have always accompanied Star Wars. This culture has a long history in the old expanded universe, where the concept of Mandalorian steel or "beskar" was first introduced back in the 1990's. The Mandalorians were often treated like Star Wars' version of the Klingons, an honorable but warlike culture, sometimes uneasily aligned with our heroes. 

Much of the old EU history was retconned even before the Disney era and Filoni has already told some of this story in animation, introducing us to the concept of the great Mandalorian ruler, Tarre Visla, a Mandalorian Jedi who was the revered ruler of his people (one of his descendants is the very big surly Mandalorian often seen with the Armorer in The Mandalorian). As is now a feature of Star Wars, we are being told the story of Mandalore and the Mandalorians out of sequence and in fits and starts, so it can be a bit jarring to jump into the story in The Mandalorian perhaps coming out of the animated shows set decades before. 

Let's break it down.

We are first introduced to the culture and the planet during a couple of different arcs on The Clone Wars, which depict a culture with a warlike past but which is now governed under a pacifist reform movement. Buy this time, the Mandalorians have destroyed much of their planet through internecine wars and mostly live in giant enclosed cities on the surface. During the Clone Wars era they are led by Duchess Satine, an old "associate" of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Satine is also the sister of Bo Katan, who opposes her as part of a terrorist group called Death Watch, lead by Pre Vizla, descended from the legendary ruler. 

Viszla's traditionalist Mandalorians consider the wielding of the Darksaber to be the true signifier of leadership of the Mandalorian people and look at Satine's political movement with contempt. Later in the Clone Wars, the Death Watch Mandalorians arrange to take over the planet in alignment with Darth Maul (yes, that one. Long story) but the planet is shortly liberated by the Republic, led by the ex-Jedi Ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan who had left Death Watch after Maul took power. That's where we leave things at the end of the war. By the way, this final arc of The Clone Wars is some of the finest Star Wars content ever created, full stop. Watch it now.

We later catch up with the Mandalorians over a decade later during Star Wars Rebels in the Imperial era when we learned that the planet had defied the Empire and had been destroyed by orbital bombardments. The surviving Mandalorians had spread throughout the galaxy, thinking Mandalore cursed and uninhabitable. 

During the time of The Mandalorian  six or seven years after the fall of the Empire, the particular group of Mandalorians that Din Djarin is associated with is referred to as Children of the Watch, a fundamentalist group spun off from Death Watch with strict rules regarding behavior and wearing of armor. Unlike the Mandalorian survivors we see in Rebels, these Mandalorians live hidden on the fringes of galactic society. Given that these are the only Mandalorians that we see in the season, we don't yet know if all surviving Mandolarians are like this or what happened to other characters like Sabine Wren or Bo Katan, who were a little more cosmopolitan in how they mixed with other cultures and regularly were seen unhelmeted. 

In many cases these Children of the Watch have no actual connection to the planet Mandalore and are only Mandalorians by creed, as is the case with Din Djarin who joined after being rescued by Death Watch during the Clone Wars. Din is not "Mandalroian" in the same sense as Bo Katan or Sabine Wren from Rebels and Ahsoka, both of whom are from old Mandalorian houses. The vibes are perhaps cultier even than the Jedi and how this all actually works has been the subject of endless speculation since the show aired.

One last thing definitely worth noting about the show is the remarkable feat of having its own musical identity in the Star Wars franchise, a series of movies that are famous for having perhaps some of the finest and most iconic movie music in the history of film. Ludvig Goransson, the Oscar-winning composer behind movies like Black Panther and Oppenheimer has here created an instantly recognizable piece of music that captures the Neo-western sci-fi vibes of the show.

The Mandarlorian is available to stream on Disney+.

City of the Gods: The Special Edition That Could Have Been

WARNING: Spoilers for City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl follow

To my (not always great) memory, the main differences between the early City of the Gods drafts and the final ones have to do with the Cortés prologue and the presence of a group of aliens on the Tliléctic Mixtli. In particular, I would have liked to have included the expanded prologue in some capacity in the new fifteenth anniversary edition, likely in an appendix.

You see, I had actually done quite a bit of research on Cortés at the time of writing COTG and my intention was to have more of him in the book. In particular, I had him surviving the initial Tlaloc attack only to be picked up by Velazquez's forces that had come to arrest him. We then see him in a sequence in which he has been imprisoned in Spain in a windy tower cell for many years. We are in full-on Gothic mode here and Cortés has become a semi-mad old prisoner who has been tortured by what he saw of the Nahuan attack on his people. His tower vantage point however gives him a great vantage point to witness an invasion of the Nahuans on Spanish soil with Tlaloc and an army of their gods.

I really liked this sequence and thought it gave good insight into the alt-history of the world from which the Tliléctic Mixtli and her crew originated, which Etzli later describes to Sandra. However, as you can read from the above description it was a bit long and complex for a prologue to a short-ish novel so the decision was made to cut it for faster pacing.

The only other major element that was in the older drafts and omitted closer to publication was the presence on the ship of an alien being, a representative of the mentioned Wayfarer species. It was one of these creatures (I believe his name was Far-ash) who attended to Sandra on the ship when she awoke, much to her horror and shock. 

I had some fun thinking up these aliens whose heads were big and shaped something like an ice cream scooper with a lot of negative space where their face would have been. I am a fan of alien creatures that are genuinely surprising and, well, alien (see any Alien movie or Annihilation for good examples of this.) I really wanted them to be something other than humans with latex applications or forehead ridges or something.

The Wayfarers were a race that the Nahuans had conquered and kept on the ship as slaves to maintain their advanced technology. They were cut later in the writing process that the longer prologue, probably to ease Sandra's journey of trusting the Nahuans since she was so freaked out and disturbed by these aliens. Also, their presence as slaves on the ship telegraphed a lot of how the Nahuans operated that it was becoming an impediment to the story so they got the axe.

Other than that, the story didn't go through a lot of changes during its development but these are items I had in mind as I was thinking about a prospective 15th anniversary edition.