#hantu

It was announced last week that WORK-LIFE BALANCE by Wayne Rée and I will be developed into an adult animated comedy series by Robot Playground Media . We’re incredibly thrilled, and so here’s a little celebratory animation doodle~

Hantu! (2017) is quite different from the rest of the A Thousand Thousand Islands series. It does not depict a fantasy region for roleplaying adventures. Rather, it muses on many currents of real world Malaysia — social, political, spiritual, folkloric — that underpin the fantasy setting, primarily filtered through an examination of the titular hantu (they’re ghosts, sort of, but not always undead — like the Japanese yokai, it is a term that doesn’t fit neatly into Western folklore taxonomies).

There are essays and memoirs and some short pieces of fiction. It all seems a bit scattered at first, but by the end it draws closed and you suddenly have…I hesitate to say “understanding.” Feel, perhaps. A better feel for the often mercurial supernaturalism present in the RPG zines. There is also a real sense of struggle, or unease, about place — about Malaysia’s cultural place in the the larger South East Asia, about SEA within Asia as a whole, with the “East” in the world of Western RPGs. The essay on the D&D penanggalan, filtered through Western vampire tropes, about jiangshi as a subset of vampires, of “Eastern” dragons as a subset of dragons, with the Western version always the default from which others derive, is particularly incisive.

Artfight 2024 (6/6)