Monster
Monsters appear in myth and folklore as adversaries to great heroes and as the consequence of evil acts. Expanding from this usage, people in the Fifth World may refer to a wide range of persons as “monsters” when they act in harmful or destructive ways.
#Monsters and evil
People in the Fifth World have, for the most part, shed the notion of universal evil. Rather, good and evil describe relative judgments. Anything that favors human beings must necessarily seem evil to the plants and animals that human beings kill to eat. Likewise, anything that harms human beings must seem good to them. While understanding this, most people in the Fifth World also have no problem centering their own perspective, and will refer to things colloquially as “good” or “evil” solely for their impact on their own community.
Thus, communities still regard creatures as evil even when they may not consider them immoral. A tiger that has eaten a human being, for example, has not done anything immoral, but has nonetheless become a monster that a human community will seek to destroy simply because it has become too great a threat to ignore.
#Mythological monsters
Communities across the Fifth World tell stories about monsters and the brave heroes who slew them. Some of these come from the era of civilization and even earlier, though frequently reinterpreted through the lens of their intervening history. In many oral traditions, one or more monsters may represent civilization itself, with the tale of brave ancestors slaying it encapsulating their history of collapse. Across North America, for example, many families speak of civilization as an epidemic of wetiko.
New monsters have also emerged in many stories. Sometimes these take the form of various cryptids like Sasquatch or sea monsters, or the fleeting glimpses of something not entirely recognized in the jungle which can feed such stories. Though perhaps not an accurate description of biological reality, such glimpses do accurately report an experienced presence and thus have a phenomenological truth that people in the Fifth World appreciate.
#Other-than-human monsters
People in the Fifth World spend much of their lives roaming their territory and observing it closely, so they generally all notice when especially large or impressive animals come and go. These become creatures worthy of respect, but generally not monsters unless and until they become destructive towards human life.
#Man-eaters
Few animals regularly prey on humans. When that changes, it becomes a cause of grave concern. Left unchecked, the behavior could spread and eventually even become normal. Most communities take it as a serious responsibility to hunt down such creatures before that can happen. On the rare occasion that a community feels otherwise, their neighbors will almost certainly pressure them to act — or even, in an extreme case, trespass into their territory to take care of the situation themselves.
Predators beginning to prey on humans happens rarely enough that when it occurs it raises other questions, most notably why. Usually this arises from severe desperation, so what has gone so seriously wrong in the local environment that a predator found itself in such a desperate situation? In cases like those of the Tsavo Man-Eaters or the Sankebetsu brown bear, ecological and social problems (which many in the Fifth World would understand as a subset of ecological problems) led directly to the attacks. This general pattern continues in the Fifth World. Thus, hunters may track down and kill such a creature, but they will see its fate as a tragedy set in motion by mistakes made elsewhere, perhaps by their own community. Once they have finished the hunt, they must discover why this happened and act to stop it, lest it happen again.
#Madness
Mad pools can have unpredictable psychological effects on animals. Animals who drink regularly from such pools may begin to act in erratic and even violent ways. Some methods do exist to rehabilitate such creatures — usually beginning with keeping them away from the mad pools — but they involve a great deal of risk. Some communities accept that risk. Others take the easier, safer route of simply killing them. Ultimately, the community must find some way to keep animals away from the mad pool, as no way yet exists to neutralize their effects.
#Human monsters
While hunters may need to track down and kill man-eaters and animals driven out of their minds by mad pools, they see these creatures as tragic more than malevolent. The same does not necessarily hold true for human monsters, who consciously choose to betray their communities.
#Psychopaths
Every human population produces a certain number of psychopaths — individuals incapable of empathy. Psychopathy might represent a sort of evolutionary “back-up plan,” a way for human beings to become solitary predators if our primary adaptation of social bonds proves ineffective. The incidence of psychopathy does vary from one group to the next. Civilizations, in particular, produced an unusually large number of psychopaths. Psychopaths show greater talent at climbing and manipulating hierarchies than normal human beings, allowing them to gain disproportionate power in such societies. From that position, they naturally make changes to reflect their own view of the world, shaping most any hierarchical society, over time, into a pathocracy that reflects the psychopath’s own worldview. This allows psychopaths to reproduce more and have more children, increasing the percentage of psychopaths in the population.
Hunter-gatherers and gardeners typically produce fewer psychopaths, but their explosion in the civilized past has continued to have an effect. Though their numbers drop with each passing generation, they remain more prevalent in the Fifth World than before the rise of civilization.
Psychopaths still belong to the societies they live in, of course, and so they find ways to express themselves within that society. In the Fifth World, stories of monsters like the ogre or the sorcerer provide a script for psychopathic behavior. Usually, psychopaths begin acting on these scripts in secret, as they involve deeply anti-social and violent behavior. As psychopaths also feel driven to take reckless risks, their activities nearly always come to light at one point or another. Most families understand that they must put such a person to death, but not infrequently they find they can’t bring themselves to kill someone they know and love, and so send him into exile instead. Thus they often set out to live in secret in or near some other community’s territory, where they begin to prey on that community instead. When that community discovers the psychopath, they have no connection to him, and rarely show such mercy.
#Ogres
The legends and stories of collapse often feature ogres: cannibals who gain supernatural strength from the consumption of human flesh, and become addicted to it because of that power. Variations of the ogre story occur all around the world, from Scandinavian trolls to the Zuni Átahsaia. The word “ogre” itself does not occur frequently in the Fifth World; rather, they tend to refer to these individuals by a more regional word.
The severity of collapse varied from one region to the next, but in many cities the situation became so dire that cannibalism did occur. Guilt, shame, and the mounting psychological pressure to justify such actions created obsessive and addictive behavior. Sometimes the cannibals themselves began to espouse the notion that human flesh gave them supernatural strength. Sometimes those who observed them thought that such a myth must drive their bizarre behavior. This belief could produce a strong placebo effect that would convince them that consuming human flesh really did enhance their strength — which would, in turn, increase the effect, until it could become truly addictive.
Once a relatively common threat in the ruins of the old cities, ogres have become exceedingly rare. Stories nonetheless linger, and people still avoid many city ruins for fear of ogres living there, even though no one has caught sight of one in generations.
One particular form of this story — the Algonquian wetiko — has taken on a much more philosophical dimension. Many across North America understand the history of civilization itself as the story of an entire society that became an ogre, rather than just one individual. They understand its impact on the environment and human beings as a larger scale version of an ogre’s cannibalism. They see individual ogres as exhibiting the same mental disorder that defined the old world.
Ogres still emerge in the Fifth World. Very rarely an individual might find herself driven to an act of cannibalism, at which point her guilt may drive her to see herself as an ogre separated from the rest of the human community, and perhaps compelled by that separation to begin preying upon that community. More often, a psychopath finds an outlet for his desires in the ogre story and begins consuming human flesh in secret, convinced that it gives him supernatural strength.
#Sorcerers
Wizards can use magic to help or to harm, and most have a reputation for both. Sinister rumors that the local wizard also works curses and hexes can help stem the tide of constant harassment. With a touch of fear and mystery, the family will only dare to bother the wizard with the most important things, and that can leave the wizard the time she needs to accomplish her real work.
While this explains most of the rumors of dark magic, those rumors hold power precisely because some wizards do use their abilities to cause harm and destruction. In fact, many wizards cross that line from time to time. Dark magic can mean anything from a relatively ineffectual expression of ill will, to trying to discover information to blackmail or coerce someone, to ecological sabotage, human sacrifice, and ritual murder.
If a sorcerer’s crimes come to light, she may try to justify them in terms of larger concerns, particularly in cases which do not involve the most gruesome possibilities. The darker her acts, and the more extensive their number, the more likely that her community will label her a sorcerer. Communities will often refer to their own magical practitioners as wizards and those of rival communities as sorcerers. When they label their own as a sorcerer, execution or exile usually follows quickly.