I was not expecting The Return of The Obra Dinn to contain monsters, and yet low and behold, only a handful of flashbacks in and I’m looking up at a man being torn in half by a kraken.
Unexpected, but not unfamiliar – as a Westerner who has brushed against stories of sea travel, the idea of a giant, ravenous octopus, hellbent on killing sailors and destroying ships, is one I am acquainted with.
I was not and still am not, however, familiar with spear-throwing wrath-like demons riding giant crabs, or mermaid-like creatures with spiked tails. Their oddity struck me, how The Obra Dinn introduced the element of the supernatural into the game with a popular sea monster, the kraken, only to jump to creatures I had never even conceived of before.
It made me curious – why now? There are plenty of other sea monsters to draw from- throw in some sirens, maybe a sea serpent – why plunge so fully into the bizarre?
From a narrative perspective, I felt like the introduction of these more mysterious and unfamiliar creatures started to crop up when the story of the Obra Dinn was becoming more complex, specifically with the involvement of the international members aboard the crew. The introduction of these mysterious shells of apparently great value that Western sailors want for themselves, and that Eastern passengers want to keep safe – shells that the mermaids in particular want to reclaim.
Foreign, untrustworthy, shrouded in mystery, hostile, murderous, but holding onto items of value that they desire to reclaim/protect.
In this way, I believe that there is a case for the sea monsters that are uncommon in Western sea monster cannon (at least, which I’m familiar with) to be an extended representation of the attitude and perception the Western sailors have of the foreign passengers on board, and by extension, the way that the West viewed the East – unknowable, monstrous, but with something of value that they could take.
From Krakens to Killer Mermaids: How The Return of the Obra Dinn uses the Supernatural to Represent Orientalism
I think it’s interesting to link the uncanny sea monsters with orientalism. Mermaids do have a sense of exoticity by themselves. I also want to note that mermaids (half-fish, half-man creatures) are common in Asian myths and tales. For example, there is a type of mermaid with human upper body, fish lower body, and four limbs in Shan Hai Jing, a 4th century BCE Chinese classics.
One of your early questions got me thinking, why these creatures instead of drawing on the host of sea monsters readily available? Since we’re on a ship looking at memories, I think it works better from a story-perspective for the monsters to be able to physically invade the space of the ship and be combatable. The sailors, for example, can’t kill a kraken, but they can kill a ghost crab and rider though it may require casualties. I think this also ties back to your argument of the monsters as representative of how the West views the East: this foreign or alien parties are, in a way, encroaching or invading into Western territory, making them a threat.