HELL IS
REAL AND
IT'S COLD
REAL AND
IT'S COLD
The Ningen is an Analog Horror series created by Alex Casanas
/Mister Manticore who also created THE MONUMENT MYTHOS, CORNERFOLKLORE and The Trinity Desk Project. The series is a Mockumentary cataloguing the Antarctic expedition of Keizo Funatsu, as told by his son Hugo Funatsu, where he encounters a bizarre creature whom he labels as "ningen" (Japanese for "human"), a whale-like humanoid from 21st Century Japanese folklore.
The series makes extensive use of wordplay, Bilingual Bonus and Lost in Translation to hide lore elements and create added tension on top of the terrifying encounters of the mythological creatures.
Current videos in the series are:
- "The Ningen (1990 Sighting)," a human encounter.
- "The Ningen (1991 Deep Sea Video)," a human myth.
- "The Ningen (1992 Ship Analysis)," a human ship.
This series provides examples of:
- Ambiguously Human: Keizo Funatsu, who may have suffered a Kill and Replace scheme by the ningen. His son Hugo is also implied to have come about via the ningen's asexual reproduction rather than being Keizo's child in the natural way.
- Bilingual Bonus: Many hidden messages are found throughout the series in a non-English language which only fluent speakers would be able to fully appreciate, especially sections where transliteration would cause context to be lost.
- For one section in the 1990 video when Keizo is lost, Keizo's name switches from its Kanji spelling (敬三), used for Japanese names, to Katakana (ケイゾウ), used to spell foreign names or loan words or to denote a thing rather than a person.
- In the 1991 video, the English and Japanese text differ significantly, with the English text on the ningen's anatomy downplaying or ignoring its deadliness while the Japanese represents it as a vicious predator. The ningen shown in the footage is also referred to as "Keizo" at one point, only in untranslated Japanese.
- The word "help" is written all over the Professor Zubov in Russian, initially ambiguous as to whether it is a cry for help from the crew or an offer to the Antarctic expedition team. The 1992 video clarifies that it is neither; that form of the word in Russian is a noun, not a verb, and it seems to have been left by the ningen possibly as a way to mock the humans.
- Bizarre Human Biology: Ningen (which literally translates to "human") are Antarctic cryptids that are essentially a supernatural sub-species of human with different morphologies based upon their stage.
- Stage 1 is terrestrial and has a long neck, a short rib cage, and massive arms and hands it uses for locomotion and hunting. Its legs are missing from the knees down, while the thighs connect to the elbow.
- Stage 2 once again has long arms, but is now aquatic and adapted its spine and ribs into a long and hydrodynamic body.
- Stage 3 discards all its limbs, including its head, and is now able to fly in the air. It also appears to be able to extend some form of tentacle from the top of its spine to strangle human prey. They can also merge with boats and absorb their crew.
- Human Factories are when a Stage 3 merges with a ship to asexually reproduce red humanoids, which in turn can asexually produce more of the same humanoids.
- Blatant Lies: Keizo's journal says everything was fine with the return home on the Professor Zubov when it was clearly attacked and infiltrated by the stage 3 ningen. Unless of course, the author is in fact the same ningen or its offspring.
- Body Horror: The Bizarre Human Biology of the ningen tends to be highly unsettling, particularly the ningen in Stage 3 (Icarus II being one of these) being nothing more than a living, flying spinal column that is able to fuse and assimilate entire ships and their crew, as Keizo Funatsu and the crew of the Professor Zubov find out.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: For a split second in the first video as Hugo is reading an excerpt from his father's journal, text appears reading, "THE FUNATSU FAMILY IS PREY".
- Heroic BSoD: Hugo is frozen in silence upon reading Keizo's Journal in 1992, who is now believed to be a ningen impostor, and discovering that the ningen intended to reproduce.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The Japanese subtitles indicate that ningen are man-eaters, and may in fact be the origin of the practice of cannibalism.
- Lost in Translation: Played for Drama. The English subtitles are often missing context or outright contradictory to the Japanese subtitles adjacent to them. While the English text seems to indicate ningen are harmless, the Japanese text indicates they are extremely dangerous and bullet-proof man-eaters. "помощь", the message written on the Professor Zubov, translates to "help", but only as a noun, indicating that it isn't a cry for help, but rather a mocking message of how the boat aided the ningen.
- Oh, Crap!: The whale in the ningen's origin story is said to have been rendered speechless and horrified by the human and his "changed form", who proceeded to merge with the whale.
- Shout-Out: The sketch of a stage 3 ningen attacking the explorers directly mirrors Utagawa Kuniyoshi's drawing Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre, with the ningen directly overlapping with the gashadokuro.
- Shown Their Work: Mister Manticore's use of wordplay to the degree shown in this series could not have been done using an automatic translator, and must have taken pains to study each language's intricacies to get their intended meaning.
WHAT WILL
HAPPEN WHEN
IT'S WARM?
HAPPEN WHEN
IT'S WARM?
