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Alex Adams

@gdemonology.bsky.social

Independent Scholar. Author of Kill Box (2024), Death TV (2021), How to Justify Torture (2019), and Political Torture in Popular Culture (2016). Currently writing GODZILLA: A CRITICAL DEMONOLOGY.

144 Posts322 Follower724 Folgt
Alex Adams@gdemonology.bsky.social · 2w ago

Great new field report! The Kaiju Papers are awesome, and this adds really important context to the racialization of the Faro Islanders in KKVG '62. Read!

The Kaiju Papers@thekaijupapers.bsky.social · 2w ago

FIELD REPORT No 16 is available: www.thekaijupapers.com/kaiju-field-... Lessons from King Kong vs. Godzilla '62 about the Ainu people, the fact that everything is connected, silence is a political choice, hyperproductivity and capitalism, and how getting on a train in a monster movie is a bad idea.

Alex Adams@gdemonology.bsky.social · 3w ago

Boosting my cfp for Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, a collection of new kaiju scholarship: call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/... Especially keen to hear about non-Godzilla texts!

Giant Monsters All-Out Attack: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century deadline for submissions: October 31, 2026 full name / name of organization: Alex Adams, Independent Scholar contact email: c21kaijucollection@gmail.com GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar
Alex Adams@gdemonology.bsky.social · 4w ago

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS! I'm working on a new collection of kaiju scholarship, provisionally titled GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: KAIJU CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, and I need your essays! Full details: www.atadamswriting.com/gmaoa-cfp

CALL FOR CHAPTERS ​​ GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century ​​ Edited by Alex Adams ​​ The kaiju genre has never been so healthy. Godzilla, now an Oscar-winner thanks to the world-leading VFX of Godzilla Minus One (2023), stars in two global movie franchises at once, with the Legendary MonsterVerse expanding into TV, print media, and video games whilst a freshly announced ‘Godzilla Universe’ promises to deliver a comparable slate of output from Japanese originators Toho. Gamera, Ultraman, and Evangelion too, have been rejuvenated in recent years; giant monsters have made prominent appearances in both the MCU (Galactus in Fantastic Four: First Steps [2025]) and DCU (Kaiju in Superman [2025]); Chinese cinema has given us Abyssal Spider (2020) and The Monster is Coming (2024), South Korean The Host (2006). Broadening its territory from the conventional US-Japan B-movie axis, the giant monster movie has entered a new golden age, but we scholars are yet to catch up. While Godzilla’s symbolic associations with nuclear weapons, Japanese historical trauma, and Cold War tensions are well-known, scholarship has yet to fully reckon with the multifaceted implications of the contemporary re-emergence of giant monsters as major cultural figures. How, for example, can we reconcile Godzilla’s progressive antinuclear political credentials with Adorno’s claim, in Minima Moralia (1951), that the fascination with giant monsters is a sublimated form of fascination with sovereign power – or indeed, how do we reckon with Shinzo Abe’s attempts to appropriate Shin Godzilla as an icon of his right-wing neoliberal government? How do we read the MonsterVerse’s conception of violently enforced natural hierarchy in a time of global fascist solidarities? There was much twentieth century talk of Cold War monstrosity, but are we yet able to talk of a post-9/11 kaiju? ... read more at https://www.atadamswriting.com/gmaoa-cfp
Alex Adams@gdemonology.bsky.social · 7mo ago

If you enjoyed Skreeonk's remarks about bisexual lighting in Godzilla Vs Kong, you may enjoy my essay that I wrote on exactly that! Here's a long read about colour, 'seriousness', and queer-coded lighting in the MonsterVerse: popmec.hypotheses.org/5186

JUST FUCK ALREADY: BISEXUAL LIGHTING IN GODZILLA VS KONG This visual austerity did not characterise the MonsterVerse for long. Three movies later, in 2021, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla Vs Kong fully embraced the more flamboyant and freewheeling aspects of Godzilla’s past. Where Godzilla 2014 shows us a grounded, sober story of an everyman caught up in the catastrophic re-emergence of a long-secluded mythic titan, Godzilla Vs Kong focuses on a high-octane showdown between Godzilla and Kong which propels the audience from Skull Island, to an ancient civilization inside the Hollow Earth, and, ultimately, to a Hong Kong showdown with Mechagodzilla, a giant telepathically-controlled robot. Where Godzilla 2014 embraces the aesthetics and tone of the 1954 original, Godzilla Vs Kong looks back fondly on the more kinetic, anything-goes approach of the sequels; where Godzilla 2014 needs you to know that it went to film school, Godzilla Vs Kong needs you to know that it likes to party.Cutting through this obnoxious masculinist iconography is precisely why a queer read of Godzilla Vs Kong is so appealing. Though on the surface it is a story about a battle to the death, most of all Godzilla Vs Kong is about attraction. Both monsters are pursuing different, specific aims—Godzilla is pursuing Mechagodzilla, which it can sense but not find, and Kong is helping the human characters access a secret power source in the Hollow Earth—but as soon as they become aware of one another, they drop everything and grapple. They can’t wait to get their hands on one another. In terms of the canonical mythology of the MonsterVerse, this is because they have a longstanding ancestral hate of one another due to an ancient titan war between their respective species. And yet we all know that love can be a dangerous obsession, that rivalry has an erotic component, and that power has a sexual charge. Why, after all, when Godzilla decapitates the MUTO and literally blasts Monster Zero into atoms, does it let Kong survive? Godzilla usually asserts dominance through murder, and yet here Godzilla exhausts Kong, roars in his face, and then leaves the ape gasping on his back. Soon, too, Godzilla and Kong team up against Mechagodzilla, with Kong tearing the robot to scrap in order to rescue his so-called enemy Godzilla. Tell me again how much you hate him, sis…BildBild
Glitterjaw@glitterjaw.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Are you team atomic lizard or team big monkey? @chels725.bsky.social ⁠⁠meets Skreeonk in Hollow Earth for the big dumb drag wrestling match and all its synthwave bisexual lighting glory! Godzilla vs. Kong is on all podcast apps: glitterjaw.com/skreeonk Cover by: @artfromdukey.bsky.social

Digital drawing of Monsterverse Godzilla fighting Kong with his axe with the outline of Mechagodzilla's head on the outside The title says SKREEONK! Godzilla vs. Kong
yaoi gagarin@mel.bzky.team · 9mo ago

if youre trans and youre struggling to justify why you as a person should be allowed to take up space in the universe just consider that by your sheer existence you make a lot of the worst people on earth mad enough that they will die early deaths from stress. so thats a p good reason

Alex Adams@gdemonology.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Trying to find the article that Honda wrote about his time working in a comfort women camp - "Reflections of an Officer in Charge of Comfort Women", in Movie Art Magazine (perhaps Eiga geijetsu in Japanese). Does anybody have any insight into finding this article, or better, a copy of it?