Animated Mayhem

Question: I suppose that wanting a catbus is a bad reason for joining the Amatsukami? Or, to what extent should anime (such as Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) be used to get an idea of the Japanese folkloric and mythological landscape?

Man, what a fun question! Anime, as an artform, absolutely loves mythic and folkloric tropes, to the point that it includes them from all over the world in frankly insane configurations at the drop of a hat. You can't swing a dead catbus in the world of anime without hitting something inspired or outright copied from some culture's myths and folktales.

But, like any artform, it has good examples and bad examples, and the bad ones far outweigh the good. For one thing, you can almost always be sure that you don't want to rely on an anime's interpretation of a non-Japanese culture's myths; they're usually crazily skewed and rewritten to appeal to a Japanese audience and have next to nothing authentic left to carry them along except for the names and basic premises. Animes like Mythical Detective Loki or RG Veda or Fushigi Yuugi can be a lot of fun, but they're perfectly awful sources for mythology.

However, when it comes to the purely Japanese tales, those have a better chance. In most cases, they're still not good sources; there are animes out there (Urusei Yatsura is a good example) that, while absolutely steeped in Japanese folklore and Buddhist/Shinto practices, interpret them in a distinctly modern, science-fiction or tongue-in-cheek way that prevents a reader from being able to really get a good sense of what those myths are about without already knowing them ahead of time. A lot of manga and anime on purely Japanese subjects assumes that the audience will also be purely Japanese and that they will already have a good grounding in this stuff, so a western viewer trying to figure out Japanese mythology from watching it would be kind of like a viewer from Africa trying to learn Norse myth by watching The Almighty Johnsons.

But it's cool that you mention Hayao Miyazaki, because he's one filmmaker whose movies are absolutely brimming with neat Japanese folklore. Spirited Away is, by far, the best for that; it's full of wacky folkloric creatures and situations, and it really gives a viewer a great idea of the flavor and behavior of creatures out of Japanese myth. Of course, it doesn't really touch on the Amatsukami themselves much and also presumes that its audience is Japanese and therefore recognizes and understands a lot of things that it doesn't bother to explain, so if you don't recognize a tanuki or shikigami on sight as the camera pans past it, you may miss out on a ton of stuff. But even so, the imagery and ideas of a lot of Japanese culture and folklore are really, really strong in the film, and you can't help but get a good read on them. The same is true of My Neighbor Totoro, to a lesser, more child-friendly extent; though it takes more liberties (for example: catbus not really a thing, sad to say), it's also doing a good job of getting some of the images and ideas of Japanese folklore across, if not the particulars.

But even Miyazaki films aren't necessarily good go-to sources. Princess Mononoke is a movie that draws heavily on metaphor and features a mostly made-up mythic landscape, and while its style is obviously very Japanese thanks to its origin, most of the business with the forest gods and so forth is fiction, not folklore. Other Miyazaki films (like Howl's Moving Castle), while gorgeous, have nothing to do with Japanese folklore at all.

Basically, you're probably never going to get a good idea of Japanese mythology from watching anime. That's not what it's for; it's there to entertain and be creative, and to those ends it makes changes, rewrites history, ignores important concepts that don't jibe with its plot, and so forth. You can sometimes get good flavor from it, because anime is above all else still very Japanese and often gives you a good window into Japanese culture, but it's far from a good source for actually learning anything about the myths or how they're treated by their people, past and present.

But to go back to the catbus: you're playing a modern Scion, and that means that modern ideas, including anime, can be as much a part of your backstory, personality and ideas as you want them to. Your Japanese Scion may have grown up watching anime, too, so even if he doesn't have a good grasp on the Amatsukami as a result, he might still view himself in those terms or want to try things he's seen in anime or concepts he's absorbed from it. The Forest God from Princess Mononoke isn't part of the Japanese mythic landscape now, but a Scion who wanted to become that could make it so.

Just make it reasonable for the character, like anything else. Dodekatheon Scions might have their conceptions of their parents colored by modern fiction surrounding them; so might Scions of the Amatsukami. I wouldn't recommend making anime the sole focus of your character because that's likely to get boring and one-note very quickly (not to mention annoy your divine parents), but Scions are by definition modern, so their modern ideas, including those from anime, are always fair game for them to expand on and try to bring into the godly arena. You will probably never get a catbus as a Birthright gift from the Amatsukami, who have never heard of it and would know that half the pantheons would probably think it was a Harmony-opposed abomination if they had, but as a Scion you have the potential power to change the divine world. If you invent catbuses, catbuses might become a real thing.

In the spirit of fun, check out this comedic modern manga version of the story of Amaterasu in Urusei Yatsura. Not mythically accurate, but definitely fun!