December 13, 2009

  • Sanrio Should Be An Illuminatus Villain

    Thanks to Hello Kitty Universe, I've been delightedly introduced to Hello Kitty Tarot Cards.  largely styled on the well-known Rider-Waite deck, but made all her own, Miss Kitty populates the legendary cards, filling in for everybody from the poor couple in the "hard times" card, the five of pentacles

    Hello Kitty 5 Pentacles

    To Death herself.

    Hello Kitty Death

    The weeping elephant and the fleeing livestock are priceless. 

    There are a couple of interesting differences between the Rider-Waite originals and the Kitty cards.  The five of pentacles has a stained glass window instead of a street light, but the mood is very much the same, and both show precipitation, although I think it's snow on the RW deck.

    The Death card is especially amusing.  Both the HK and the RW deck have the Reaper coming in on a pale horse from the left, and both have the setting/rising sun between the pillars.  There is water on both pictures (I'm assuming that the yellow pee color is just the light on the water).  Both cards have "people" (or at least anthropomorphic denizens) on them, inclduding a fallen person trod beneath the horse's hooves.  However, the HK card has one fewer:  noticeably missing is the bishop supplicant to death, the only character to "welcome" death, knowing that what's on the other side is a lot better -- or better be to make up for that whole "worldly" stuff he opted out of. 

    The creatures in the HK card not being trampled by the Ultimate Reality's steed, however, are depicted as fleeing rather amusingly pell mell, and wisely going in opposite directions.  You can almost imagine them saying, "Take the pig! Take the pig! He's tasty and made of bacon!" "Nooo! Take the rabbit! lapin a l'orange and you can use his pelt!"

    Edited to add:  one more rather hilarious difference is that the actual RW card depicts death holding not a scythe, which is the usual implement he's known to carry, but a flag with a white rose (like the one the Yorkist kings used) on a black background.  Obviously, Miss Kitty was either a) cutting an insufficiently menacing figure without the scythe or b) cutting an insufficiently obvious death figure without the scythe.  So they gave her both the scythe and the rose.

    Because Hello Kitty with a flag of a white rose (or just the rose) would look more like some weird farm-animal polo than Death, and then it'd just be way too confusing.  It'd be terrifying too, in its own way, using her "friends" as polo balls, trampling them down in her attempt to get them to sniff the flower, but not in the way I think they intended.