Another one very niche post where I rant about something only few people know or care about!
Let's talk about why I have a beef with Kiyomune Miwa.
Who is Kiyomune Miwa, you ask? To use his title (or at least what they call him), he is the "occult researcher" for Type-Moon: that means he researches things about real-life occult subjects, but also more broadly, anything about non-Japanese cultures, which goes from providing details about mythologies to providing translations for foreign languages like Latin. For example, and to show how long he has been working with Type-Moon, you can see him in the credits of the original Fate/stay night visual novel as the guy who provided Gaelic translations. Here he is as the last name in the list:
Like OKSG, BLACK, and Hirokazu Koyama, Miwa is one of those obscure, but regular, names in TM production* you know of only if, like me, you're that deep in the weeds (not so much Koyama and BLACK, since the former is known as the main illustrator for Mahoyo while the latter designed Servants for FGO). Unlike them, his job is even more niche so he is really a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, but you can find his name if you search a bit.
In interview for the fourth KnK movie, Nasu gives him a shoutout as the one who helped with the runes:
Q: After Tōko cast her spell on the corpse, she mentioned something about the "ᚨ (Ansuz)" being too weak. What's an Ansuz? <Dango> Takeuchi: Oh, that. Just Google it! Nasu: Though the precise meaning of each rune varies depending on the magus, Ansuz is generally used for "Combustion". …Well, that's the rule in Kara no Kyōkai, anyway. The maximum effect of Ansuz is actually "to make known". Aside from that, according to Miwa-sensei, Dagaz and Ehwaz are also very popular choices as fire-type runes! Takeuchi: You should Google Miwa-sensei, too!
In the original Apocrypha online game idea, he is named as the creator of Saint George (and man does it show). And, more visibly, every afterwords of Sanda or Narita in their respective light novel series thank him (as well as "Team Barrel Roll", which seems to be a group or company he created for that purpose) for his research for their stories. This is also why you can see his name credited in almost every Fate anime adaptations, where his contributions is usually providing accurate translations of foreign languages or help design occult symbols correctly; we likely have him to thank for things like Olga in Grace Note and Semiramis in Apocrypha having actual Mesopotamian cuneiforms in their magic circles.
Outside of Type-Moon, he also has credits in Boruto (wrote some episodes and one LN), Attack on Titan (consultant for both manga and anime I believe), Re:Creators (Latin translation), Steins;Gate (wrote some of the LNs), and Tokyo Ravens ("incantation research"). So he is certainly busy.
So what's my beef with this pretty obscure, occult nerd? Well, the first and pettiest reason is a bit of envy. Imagine your job being to research mythologies and occultist traditions to provide input to a very successful urban fantasy franchise. Below writer, that's the dream creative job, next to being a conlanger or a cartographer(?)/map artist for fantasy series. Of course I would be a little jealous of turning a hobby into a profession lol
please hire me i am very good at researching very niche and useless topics pleeeeaaaase
But the second and main reason, is that...Miwa is frequently wrong? In obvious and specific ways.
He can do some impressive research work, pulling out the most obscure things which is very impressive for a guy who might not even speak those languages, but he also seems, to me, to have no distinction between what is a good source and what is a bad source, so he will happily use stuff that is repeated in New Age or neopagan books by people with not a lick of credible background, and this is then added to Fate to my great annoyance. My favorite and go-to example is when, back when the Babylonia anime aired, he had a long-winded explanation on Twitter (translated here) about the meaning of the Gorgon's magic circles which was just...extremely nonsense. It goes from the unproven but frequently asserted "the Gorgon started as a goddess/aspect of Athena" and it goes up from there.
Everytime I see not only inaccurate, but extremely bullshit explanations of myths in Fate, I am convinced Miwa had a hand in it, especially when it concerns syncretism, where it's usually where all hell break loose. Spoilers for Adventures, but Volume 3 revealing Set = Typhon = ĹŚkuninushi even though it could really only make the case for Set-Typhon and not really ĹŚkuninushi, was so very frustrating. Because while you can follow a trail of syncretism from West to East thanks to Alexander's conquests resulting in the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms, which provided a contact between the western Greek religion with eastern ones like Buddhism, the operative word here is Greek, not Egyptian. AFAIK, there is little evidence of Egyptian gods, even syncretized Greco-Egyptian gods, going the way of the Silk Road and ending up adapted into new gods the father east into Asia (feel free to prove me wrong).
And then there is this from the explanation:
Ergo finally asked Waver to name the second god. Reines told that Atlas chose a god who traveled from West to East, and being the Atlas god, Egypt was a key part of the route. And Ruo's ties to Oonamuchi through Yinglong bring up the motif of the ox and the dragon. One pair in this motif is Zeus and Typhon, the monster created as Gaia's weapon of revenge against Zeus. Typhon was eventually sealed in a volcano, Mount Etna, as represented by Ruo's Blaze of Etna. Ruo's dragon is Typhon, and his corrosion trait comes from the toxicity of volcanic gas (+ his son Hydra being a venom dragon). His other trait of growing 100 snakes on his shoulders led to many variants of himself being spread around the world. Hydra->Manggus->Yamata-no-Orochi->Oonamuchi's snake form. And most relevantly, Typhon is syncretized with an Egyptian god. Ruo, Ergo, and Akira have 3 versions of the same god. Like 3 different masks worn by the same actor.
This supposed "motif" annoys me to no end, because it's an extremely shaky generalization to make, and also Shin Megami Tensei V made the same claim, so clearly there is some source the Japanese otaku writers of urban fantasy take it from:
Shigeo Komori (director of SMTV): We developed more on the relationship between the Snake God and the Bull God. The snake is also associated with dragons, which are revered and worshipped in many parts of the world. The snakes are worshipped by the people in some parts of the world as gods, but they also have legends of being defeated in other areas. I noticed that in some cases, the Bull God that is nicknamed as the Horned God is the one that defeats the Snake God or serves as its servant.
This is half true and half reductive.
It's clearly referencing chaoskampf, the motif in mythology of a serpent/snake/dragon/sea monster representing chaos being fought against and defeated to create order, sometimes by a culture hero, but more often by a storm or sky god. And yes, a lot of those gods were depicted to have horns and thus are dubbed "horned gods", partly because bulls were seen as sacred in the Mediterranean, but also tellingly, it wasn't just bull horns, the horns could be from a ram or an antelope. But that's the thing: some mythologies had all these elements together. It wasn't an universal constant as Miwa Adventures and SMT Komori painted it as.
Because then what about the Ophiotaurus, the half-bull half-snake creature who innards could be used to kill the gods? Or how do you categorize Achelous, a river god who could transform into both a snake or a bull? Or Hathor, the Egyptian goddess associated with cows, who is depicted with a headdress displaying both horns and a snake (the uraeus)? It's way more complicated than claiming chaoskampf is about a bull headed god fighting a snake god.
And the examples in Adventures just do not work. Yes, Zeus is associated with bulls, and yes Typhon is a dragon and serpentine with the snakes on his body. And it is true that Osiris was associated with bulls as Osiris-Apis. But if you examine the details it falls apart: for one, Osiris lost against Set, and two, out of both of them Set is the storm god, not Osiris. He is also the protector of Ra's barque during its nightly voyage in the underworld, where Set protects Ra by fighting...demonic snakes. From the get go the attempt at trying to prove more connection besides the actually historical syncretism of Set-Typhon is full of holes. And that's not even mentioning the very tenuous link of Okinushi having a snake form with the multi-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi that Susano'o defeated (the latter ironically perhaps having had his role as storm god invented late in the 19th century).
The real kicker is that it didn't have to be so complicated by trying to accommodate a theory on mythological similarities. The bird and the snake are a similarly named motif, except you know, it is fairly documented. and right there could have serve the plot just fine. Zeus is associated with eagles and defeated the snake monster Typhon. Horus, the falcon-headed god, defeated his uncle Set. Just do something similar with the Japanese god: Shintoism has Yatagarasu, a three-legged crow and servant of Susano'o, and if Record of Ragnarok can have Susano'o transform into a crow based on that, a power he never had, he could also be somewhat forced to have crows as his animals to fit the motif of bird vs. snake. And there you go, you're golden without spreading bad information.
Moving on, look at what Saint George's original sheet says:
Incidentally, the name "Georgius" was originally related in sense to the tilling of the earth in ancient farming communities -- rooted in the reverence of the Middle Eastern God of Harvest, Ba'al.
Again, complete unproven nonsense. At best, you can say that the artistic motif of the Thracian horseman influenced artistic depictions of George and that he has been associated with the Hebrew prophet Elijah, and that the Islamic character associated with him, Khidr, is theorized to have roots in Utnapishtim and the Ugaritic god Khotar. Heck, even his name as roots in an epithet for Zeus, Zeus Georgos ("the Farmer"), his aspect as a god of harvest. But Baal, of all things, seems based on nothing (at best you can say he was syncretized with Zeus, but to go from there to Saint George requires a great amount of stretch).
And this is why I beef with Miwa, because of his inconsistent track record where he will just assert things that are either only somewhat true or completely false, and the Fate will bold facedly and publish it, and voilĂ , now fringe or dubious theories are out in the public to be absorbed as true by unsuspecting readers. You can imagine my pleasant surprise when Miwa didn't go for a pop cultural memetic recounting of Lilith's origins, but instead the more accurate version where her being Adam's wife is a later, fabricated story.
More of this, not hodgepodge syncretism.
