Retooling the Tohoverse: Several Kaiju in need of the “Minus One” treatment

The Mother of Monsters: Mothra!

Out of the hundreds of giant creatures, heroes, monsters, and mech that I love (and I love a lot) there is one name, one thing that I love over all of them. That is Mothra. From a young age, the moment I laid eyes on her I loved it. I think she’s one of the best designs in kaiju. The color scheme pops and lies in sharp contrast to the dark earth tones of the other monsters. The big bright blue eyes tied with the brilliant white fur convey everything you need to know about her personality somehow. But how would the mother of monsters fit into the Minus One verse? Let’s get into it.

First a bit about her for those of you who might be unfortunate enough to not know the joy that is Mothra.

Mothra first appeared, believe it or not, in a 1961 manga-esque book titled The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. If you’re a Mothra fan you probably didn’t read it though because…it is rough. It’s just a tough thing to get to because it is done in a really weird way with a very bizarre art style and it’s about as fun a read as the instruction manual for an air filter. Luckily, they adapted it into the much more enjoyable Mothra motion film the same year. Three years later she’d get into a match with Godzilla and really enter the public eye.

And while, okay, admittedly, Mothra’s first appearance had her completely lay waste to both Toyko AND Newkirk City, she often serves as a deity of peace, protecting humanity from monsters as well as her dark counterpart Battra, a massive black moth created by the planet as a punishment for mankind tampering with nature.

And this, right here, is why Mothra could work in the Minus One universe. Imagine a moment in history when mankind messed with the planet more than they did in the mid-1940s. Battra is drawn to where the destruction happens and blames the people there for it as, obviously, having a conversation with a massive moth of death is an exercise in futility.

So this would be the main driving point of Mothra Minus One. A large black moth starts terrorizing the community and in the moment of the least amount of hope Mothra shows up, alongside her Shobijin (two small women that harold her arrival), and saves them from her darker counterpart.

It would be less of the traditional horror-based kaiju film and more a message of hope and peace, as is befitting of Mothra.