Godzilla King Of The Monsters Missing Titans: Yamata No Orochi Explained

Yamata no Orochi is one the Titans confirmed to exist in Godzilla: King of the Monsters who doesn’t appear on-screen. His name, along with many others, can be spotted on a monitor at one of Monarch’s bases. A map of all the Monarch outposts reveals that the mysterious Titan is being kept at Monarch Outpost 91, located at Mount Fuji in Japan. Nothing further is revealed about him.

The beginning of Godzilla: King of the Monsters expands the number of known Titans in the MonsterVerse to 17. A handful of these are established Titans like Godzilla, Kong, Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah, but all the others are original to the MonsterVerse. Ghidorah’s call wakes them all up, allowing audiences to get a good look at new Titans such as Scylla, Behemoth, Methuselah, and a third M.U.T.O. During the events of the movie, it’s revealed that at least 17 Titans exist somewhere in Legendary’s MonsterVerse, and several of them – including Yamata no Orochi – never appear in the flesh.

So, who is Godzilla: King of the Monsters‘ Yamata no Orochi? Japanese mythology could hold the answer. In ancient Japanese stories, Yamata no Orochi is a mystical, red-eyed dragon with eight heads and eight tails. According to the legends, it was so long that its body extended across “eight hills and eight valleys“. In the story, the dreaded creature was a beast who devoured the children of an elderly couple each year until they had only one left. A god named Susanoo was able to protect the couple’s last child from Orochi.

Since Yamata no Orochi is an important figure in Japanese mythology, Toho created their own version of the legendary dragon in the 1959 movie, The Birth of Japan, which was a re-telling of the story about Susanoo and his encounter with the creature. In the movie, it was depicted as an eight-headed snake. It was reimagined for the 1994 film, Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon. Though it had eight heads, this particular version looked quite similar to the three-headed King Ghidorah, in terms of body structure and the design of its heads.

It’s interesting to note that King Ghidorah himself was actually inspired by Yamata no Orochi, and in one film, Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, it’s stated that the creature from the legends really is Ghidorah. Due to the connections between the two monsters, it’s worth wondering how similar the Godzilla: King of the Monsters‘ Yamata no Orochi is to Ghidorah. If how Orochi is described in the legends is a fairly accurate description of the Titan version, then that would mean that like Ghidorah, Orochi is a multi-headed (and multi-tailed) dragon. The MonsterVerse may be occupied by several dragons, but Ghidorah and Orochi seem more closely related than the others. If the creature is even close to as powerful as Ghidorah, he could make for a rather interesting challenge for the King of the Monsters.

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