With the passing of August the 1st, we are now officially in the Halloween season! Hurrah! The stores are stuffed with poor quality plastic spiders and bats, Bogleech is posting regularly, and the lymph harvesters have begun spewing their toxic ichor all across the land! Honestly, three months is barely enough for this most magical time of year, but somehow we all manage to survive. The coming of the season this year in particular has led me to an interesting thought though, an interest I've always had but never really acknowledged. I really like skeletons. Like, a lot. If I could walk around with my skeleton showing and not die of blood loss and/or stonings, I would do it all the time. Every time, in fact. I would never not be a skeleton, strutting about town to show off my cool skull, awesome impacted ribcage off the hook mandible!
But skeletons are not just aesthetically pleasing to me, OH NO, this is deeper than that. I love skeletons as a concept. The idea of a hardened, semi-organic, calcified framework existing inside of every single person just fascinates me. Not just that, but the fact that its likely that this hardy little frame is going to be the only solid evidence that any particular human existed at all! BUT WAIT THAT'S NOT ALL, they can tell you more about people you already thought you knew about, like our good friend Richard here!
People used to think he was a hunchbacked, crippled, creepy little jerk! How silly is that??? Just look at those bones, so
STRONG and
CHARISMATIC and
NORMALLY PROPORTIONED. Clearly nothing but slander hurled by some nerd jealous of those sweet ulnas.
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| Doot doot |
Yet even more fascinating are the varying portrayals of skeletons in art and culture. Being so closely tied with death and the dead, skeletons often serve as reminders of the impermanence of life and the inevitability of death. The medieval allegory
Danse Macabre, for instance, uses a skeleton to represent Death itself. Death leads both the rich and the poor off to join his morbid dance, and cuts quite a strapping figure as he does so!
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| Wheeeee! Allegories are fun! |
The portrayal of skeletons in the context of Halloween is especially interesting, as in recent times the skeleton has become somewhat of a goofy figure rather than something to be feared like barn owls. Despite the fact that a 'living' skeleton is literally the only remaining pieces of a long dead human walking around of its own volition, no one seems to be able to take them seriously anymore. But I'm certainly not complaining, its this particular portrayal I appreciate the most, the spooky skeleton clattering around a graveyard at night, playing the xylophone with his friend's ribcage and clacking his pearly teeth. At best, this skeleton can hope to scare some amorous teens with strange ideas about date destinations, or perhaps harass some low-level adventurers. But that's just what makes it so lovable, it's goofy and silly and yet still wonderfully macabre.
Oh, and they're also
excellent dancers.
