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The Symbolism and Biology of MOTHRA

Toho Studios has produced a LOT of giant monsters over the years, many of them easily recognizable by name alone: Godzilla, Rodan, Ghidorah –but the weirdest of the bunch has got to be Mothra. 

One of the very few female giant monsters, Mothra is extremely popular in Japan and holds fans around the world because of her uniqueness. 

Though on the surface she’s just a giant moth, she’s a lot more than that. 

Biology

First off, she’s not a moth. 

She’s not a butterfly either.  She’s not even a member of the order Lepidoptera, where both are grouped.  She lacks one of the key defining features of that group:  a proboscis.  Instead, she has pincher jaws.  She’d be something of an evolutionary throwback in that sense, something between Caddis flies (Trichoptera) and Lepidoptera

Lepidoptera and Trichoptera

Having already talked about giant bugs before, it’s tempting to just repeat myself. 

That Mothra is so huge (originally, she had a wingspan of almost 900ft, she was downsized to join Godzilla in a fair fight, a wingspread of about 450ft) that the only way she could support herself would be if she was made of super dense materials and had an internal support structure in addition to her carapace. 

This is backed up by both her forms shrugging off military hardware as if they were pea shooters.  In the original film and the “Showa” Godzilla movies, Mothra was only really harmed by the energy rays of Godzilla and King Ghidorah, so we have a limit to her durability (an extreme one, but a limit nonetheless). 

Then she has the audacity to fly at supersonic speeds just by flapping her wings.  Toho lists her official speed as Mach 3, though we don’t see her break the sound barrier on screen, she certainly covers the distance from Tokyo to New York fast enough (yes, New York, the original film’s American dub did its best to cover over the fact that greedy American businessmen were the bad guys).  That, with her body structure and just flapping, would be normally impossible.  But, as my mantra goes—she does it on screen, so we have to go with it. 

Whatever keeps her aloft, its wings still generate hurricane force winds that send not just debris and people, but cars flying through the air.  It’s pretty inexplicable from a purely biological standpoint, which is not even getting into what she can do later on. 

Mothra just kept adding on powers after her first appearance, where she had a silken thread as a caterpillar alone.  By Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964), the adult Mothra gained a poisonous powder she spread from her wings. 

That is not too off base from reality at least.

Many moths and butterflies are known to be toxic. The beautiful Monarch Butterfly uses the toxins of the Milkweed  the larva feeds on to its own end, for example.  Though transferring it to powdery scales is a bit beyond that.  By the 1990s, she gained ray beams from her antennae, the ability to drop scales that could reflect energy rays back at the attacker and a “Holy Seal” ability. 

When she got her own movie series (where she was killed off so her son, Mothra Leo, could be the new protagonist—Women in Refrigerators doesn’t just apply to people, it seems) Mothra was shooting beams out of everywhere.  It was like Toho asked a hyperactive kid where Mothra’s new weapons should come from. 

Thankfully, by the time she returned to the Godzilla series, she lost those powers and had an analogue to the Poison powder—letting lose the scales of her wings to cloud sensors and disrupt attacks against her.  A nifty modern trick in the era off stealth airplanes, but at the price of damaging her wings.

Weird stuff.  How could a simple radioactive bug do all that? 

Well, for starters, she’s not simply a radioactive bug.

Symbolism

If Mothra confronted Gozer  the Gozerian, and Gozer asked her “Are you a God?” she would answer with a simple chirp of “Yes”. 

And she would not be lying. 

Mothra has been worshiped as a God since her first film, complete with a religious dance ritual and lots of bowing.  Toho really liked giving out dance numbers for Mothra back in the 60s—probably because they had the pop sensation duo “The Peanuts” as her priestesses. 

Yes, those twin “Fairies” that Mothra follows around are her priestesses.  In the original film and older Godzilla films, they were called the “Shobijin”.  Fairies is a good enough translation, though. 

That might bring to mind the phenomenon called “Cargo Cults”, where the unknown (modern technology) is taken up as divine gifts.  From all appearances, Mothra is just another giant bug. 

One that has a telepathic awareness of where her priestesses are and one who has a life and death cycle similar to that of a Phoenix.  Whenever Mothra dies, she lives on in her single egg.  That’s not a biological thing, that’s a Phoenix form of Immortality. 

Mothra’s behavior lines up more with a pagan deity than any living thing. 

She is more kind and loving than most anything found in the Greek pantheon, but shares their capacity for massive amounts of destruction should they be crossed.  And that right there is the key to the most iconic of Japan’s giant monsters.  

Even when they are nuclear mutants and revived prehistoric beasts, they are much more than that. 



They are gods.

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