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This paper will discuss the Wiindigo, a cannibalistic character among some Indigenous peoples of North America. Illustrated through the Anishinaabeg and Oji-Cree, two Algonquin-speaking Indigenous groups, the Wiindigo serves as a personification of fear and hunger, and alludes to the cultural heritage elements of the boreal forest food system as well as the differing legal systems in Canada. In examining the Wiindigo from the Indigenous cultural and historical perspectives related to the author by several knowledge-holders, as well as from EuroCanadian popular culture representations, the paper illustrates the importance of the Wiindigo to Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree world views, customary governance, and contemporary lived experience.

The paper presents a short story entitled Wanda by Zuzanna Orlińska as a posthumanist reinterpretation of the traditional ethnocentric legend. Subtle changes in te character’s motivation and expanding the plot of Wanda’s story into two other texts create a new understanding of community (not only a national one), as well as a new model of women’s participation in it. The foundations of this new model are agency, care and interdependence.

The nature of human-animal hybrid beings (or therianthropes) is examined in an Animistic (traditional San Bushman) and a Cartesian (Early Modern Western) cosmology. In each ontological ambiguity is imagined and conceptualized in different terms. One of them is through monstrosity, which, in the Western schema, is equated with human-animal hybridity. This equivalence threatens the boundaries and categories that buttress western cosmology, through a being – the human-animal hybrid – deemed a conceptual and epistemological abomination. It elicits a category crisis that is as much cerebral as it is visceral as the were-beings it conceives are feared and demonized. No such valences attach to therianthropes in the cosmology described in this paper. It is an “entangled” cosmology shot through with ambiguity and fluidity in which human-animal hybridity is neither abominable nor feared. Instead, as a pervasive and salient theme of San world view and lifeways, especially its expressive and ritual spheres, along with hunting, ontological mutability becomes an integral component of people’s thoughts and lives and thereby normalized and naturalized. Beings partaking of this state are deemed another species of being with whom humans engage as other-than-humans, on shared social terms. Monsters are beings who negate or transgress the moral foundation of the social order. San monstrosity, conceptually and phenomenologically, becomes thereby a matter of deviation from social (moral) pre/proscriptions rather than from classificatory (ontological) ones. This basic conceptual difference notwithstanding, we also find a fundamental commonality: the inversion, through monsters and monstrosity, of each cosmology’s underlying epistemic matrices, of structure and ambiguity, respectively.

The need to better understand the supernatural is an ever-engaging aspect of any enquiry into the matter due to the changing paradigms of time and space and the existence of numerous misconceptions and observations concerning the same. Such is a case of the legend of U Thlen and the nongshohnoh phenomenon of Meghalaya, a north-eastern state in the sovereign country of India. U Thlen, an evil mystical being, is described in Khasi legends and recounted in Khasi folklore as an entity thirsty for human blood and never satiated. He was, however, tricked and captured by the Khasi people but never ultimately destroyed. As an act of deception – of reward and mainly revenge, U Thlen promised people riches in exchange for human sacrifice. An existing belief is that U Thlen was adopted by a Khasi household which saw the beginning of the nongshohnoh or the “cut throat” phenomenon. The surrounding belief about the keeping of U Thlen functions on the basis of prevailing social notions that human sacrifice offered to U Thlen equates to riches. While the legend of U Thlen has witnessed transcendence from narratives to lived realities over an incredible part of the history of the Khasi people, the nongshohnoh phenomenon has seen its fair share of criticism with time as well. It is in this regard that this study aims to (re)look into this very phenomenon as a living reality of the Khasi society. This paper also aims to look at existing beliefs and disbeliefs in U Thlen and the nongshohnoh phenomenon in order to arrive at an understanding, proper to the contemporary setting of the Khasi society, in the twenty-first century.

The article offers an analysis of the frequency and quality of LGBTQ+ representation in fictional podcasts. I examine how frequently and with what intent LGBTQ+ characters are included in this medium. This research aims to fill the gap in academic work on LGBTQ+ representation in podcasts. Though scholars note an increase in representation in mainstream media, LGBTQ+ media consumers, especially young people, still look to other sources for validation of their identities. Many LGBTQ+ people look to fictional podcasts as a source of quality representation, especially because podcasts are small-scale and rely on the funding, and thus the opinion, of listeners (Bottomley, 2015). In this paper, I analyze four fictional podcast series for LGBTQ+ inclusivity. I note how many LGBTQ+ characters are included and in what proportion. I assess the quality of representation in four ways: diversity, depth, and the frequency and type of stereotypical LGBTQ+ tropes. My findings show a high frequency of LGBTQ+ characters and diversity of personalities and backgrounds, opportunities for these characters to express their sexual and/or gender identities as well as LGBTQ+ trope subversions. Thus, we see that fictional podcasts, as a medium that sustains itself by listeners’ patronage, present stories that their audience can relate to. As a result, fictional podcasts create more niche stories that make connections with smaller demographics of media consumers.

The subject of the article is fantasy as a speculative "moral laboratory". The literary and axiological aspect of searching for patterns of identity in the postmodern world by young readers of this type of literature is a fundamental problem. The starting point are the questions of the young person present in this fantasy (Ursula K. le Guin, Philip Pullman, Andrzej Sapkowski). The article assumes a look at literary texts (science fiction and fantasy) in terms of their possible speculative functions. This function is seen as one of the potential dominant interpretative features appearing in the area of interaction with a virtual or real reader. We want to examine under which conditions literary fiction can be treated as a "moral laboratory". The description of this function proposed by Paul Ricoeur has been extended in this paper on the basis of theoretical considerations of J.R.R. Tolkien. In such a spectrum, the literary ways of working of this function and their non-literary perspectives were presented. The analysis focuses on the most recent and slightly older texts to indicate the process of transformation of the dominant feature.