Psychopomp Up The Jam
In every culture of every region of the world, there's nothing quite as inscrutable as death and the journey beyond. We all formed our own ideas, despite the fact that most of them admittedly quite stupid. However, our psyches are such that it's somehow easier to swallow a fairytale where we continue to exist without our brains (which we sort of need to do anything, ghost-form or no) than the finality of our own demise, which is where psychopomps come in. Despite sounding like a minor villain from a sci-fi dystopian cyberpunk fiction with his own stable of robot hookers that he mistreats terribly, a psychopomp is actually a mythological figure whose job it is to ferry the dead to wherever they need to be. Most obvious to us would be ol' G. Reepz, that scythe-wielding, cowl-rocking skullster that so plagued our playthroughs of Shadowgate, Castlevania and Paperboy back in the day, but there's also plenty of others from various mythologies and religions that have been well-represented in video games, as this list demonstrates. (For more on the former, check out this blog I wrote a while back.)
I know! Talking about death is so chipper! But damn it if a snowy March 22nd doesn't bring out one's inner morbid malcontent.
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