"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy. They do not attack people because they want to, but because of their size and strength, mankind has no other choice but to defend himself. After several stories such as this, people end up having a kind of affection for the monsters. They end up caring about them."
He recovered consciousness to see Godzilla bearing down on him with all the fury of a mutant monster who's been woken by some idiot using an H-bomb as an alarm clock.
Every country has a monster
They’re afraid of in their nation
Every monster has a country
Yeah, a station they call their home
He remembered those first surprisingly clear pieces of footage transmitted on the Internet, and then again on the news channels: HD quality CCTV pictures of some great lizard-like beast emerging from the shadows on the coast, a B Movie come to life. But this was not a man in a suit, or a too-crisp CGI image. It was colossal, the height of two tower blocks, one standing on top of the other. Its arm span was half a mile across, but it barely needed to stretch them so far to tear down a church, a town hall, a factory warehouse... bullets and bombs simply bounced off its thick, plated hide to create more damage to the surrounding area. Its call was the trumpet of Armageddon. When it opened its mouth to roar, the sound was unlike anything humanity had heard before. Nobody knew what the creature was, where it came from, why it appeared. The scientists mumbled in jargon, talked about tectonic planets, seismic events, and then finally they went quiet. They locked themselves into deep underground laboratories to try and invent something that would kill the thing.
And then... it went away, slinking back into the ocean...
—Kaiju, by Gary McMahon
140 millions years ago, the incredible Ultrasaurs
wander the earth! Some weigh over 70 tons, and even the vicious allosaurs are no match for these giants!
But what's this? A distant rumbling sends the Ultrasaurs into a panicked stampede! Is it a volcano? Is it an earthquake?
No! It's... It's a Calvinosaurus!
Named after the renowned paleontologist who discovered it, the huge Calvinosaurus can eat an Ultrasaur in a single bite!
wander the earth! Some weigh over 70 tons, and even the vicious allosaurs are no match for these giants! But what's this? A distant rumbling sends the Ultrasaurs into a panicked stampede! Is it a volcano? Is it an earthquake?
No! It's... It's a Calvinosaurus!
Named after the renowned paleontologist who discovered it, the huge Calvinosaurus can eat an Ultrasaur in a single bite!
The point is, Kaiju movies frequently make statements about the world, the things that scare us, and what we can do about them, and as a result, they are sometimes extremely political when you look at them. Sometimes they say we can't do anything about them, sometimes they say that problems are our fault, and sometimes they bounce back to wish-fulfillment and imagine that the giant unstoppable force is a good thing that will fix our giant unfixable problems. And sometimes they say is up to us to work together and face the problem head on, to admit that things are bad and fight to the very end to make them better again. And also, sometimes it's just fun to watch two incomprehensibly giant monsters kick the crap out of each other.
Oh dear. You've sure gotten big...Kuro-tan.
—Rinko Akaishi, Kaiju Girl Caramelise
"I was fifteen when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco. By the time tanks, jets and missiles took it down, six days and 35 miles later, three cities were destroyed. Tens of thousands of lives were lost."
—Raleigh Becket, Pacific Rim
"Civilization crumbles as its death rays blast a city of 6 million from the face of the earth!"
—Tagline for Godzilla (1954)
"A violent giant monster exhaling radioactivity plunges Japan into the depths of fear!"
—Tagline for Godzilla (1954)
"When is a giant monster not a giant monster? When it's a giant metaphor! Let's do this!"
When Ziel spoke, his voice was dead. "I used to lead a sect of my own. We decided that we could survive a Dreadgod. I decided. First, we felt the aura tremble, like footsteps shaking the ground. What you're feeling now."
He nodded to the walls. "Next, the sky changed color. It's a change that accompanies each of the Dreadgods, as their power overwhelms all aspects of vital aura. We hunkered down inside defenses, layers of scripts that had stood for centuries."
Ziel trailed off for a moment as he remembered the sky, raining lightning.
No one else spoke.
"One by one, it stripped away our defenses. Tore off the roof. Toppled buildings. Our techniques were only food for it. And the Dreadgod never stopped, it never saw us, it simply flew on by. We were stripped to the bone by its footsteps, by the wind from its passage. To it, we were only ants."
Silence still reigned in the room.
He nodded to the walls. "Next, the sky changed color. It's a change that accompanies each of the Dreadgods, as their power overwhelms all aspects of vital aura. We hunkered down inside defenses, layers of scripts that had stood for centuries."
Ziel trailed off for a moment as he remembered the sky, raining lightning.
No one else spoke.
"One by one, it stripped away our defenses. Tore off the roof. Toppled buildings. Our techniques were only food for it. And the Dreadgod never stopped, it never saw us, it simply flew on by. We were stripped to the bone by its footsteps, by the wind from its passage. To it, we were only ants."
Silence still reigned in the room.
— Cradle Series: Bloodline
