You never quite know what postings are going to draw a response. A recent item on a plague of screaming giant moths (yes really) in France produced two distinct memes (is that the word?):
1. The suggestion that the French would surrender to (and collaborate with) the moths.
That’s a touch harsh.
2. That the post’s headline ‘Not Mothra’ was unfair to Mothra. Mothra was, I was told, a benign figure.
That’s a touch generous. I discussed this important question with a Japanese friend. His view was that Mothra (for the few who don’t know, Mothra was a giant moth who started appearing in Japanese movies in the early 1960s) had behaved ‘questionably’ in her first movie, but had become progressively more sympathetic. By ‘questionably’, he was referring to the destruction of Tokyo, although one reader tried to justify this as follows:
“If you’re talking about the ravaging of Tokyo in the original “Mothra” movie, Mothra was just looking for the twin fairies, who had been kidnapped, a perfectly morally defensible thing to do. The only time Mothra ever really did anything bad was when she was under alien control by the evil Kilaak aliens in Destroy All Monsters .”
And that is the end of the Mothra meme.