Here’s one we all know yet has next to no history that I can find.
Slimes.
It’s odd, earliest references are only 100 years or so old. Probably because before cellular theory the idea of slimes was too foreign to become widespread? The modern idea of slimes we all know was only popularized with the coming of Dragon Quest. There were a few others before that, but the bouncing balls of goo we all love started less than fifty years ago.
Any insights into mythical relations of our gooey friends?
You are rather correct that slimes are a fairly recent development. There's really little about them historically.
That said, there is actually a lot more to the story that I know just off the top of my head in terms of how slimes have developed differently between Eastern and Western RPGs.
That said, while the Eastern development stemming from Dragon Quest is rather clean-cut, I think there might be a little deeper I can dig back into the Western portrayal of slimes to before D&D. It might shed some light into how the Western portrayal of slimes are so much more powerful and horrific compared to the Eastern version.
(That's normally something I look for. If it's a cute and fairly non-threatening monster, it's probably modern. If it's absolutely horrific, or at least requires some kind of special care when figuring out what to do with it, then there's a chance that there's more to the story going back into older lore.)
So, for now, I will hold on the Eastern slimes while I try to dig into the Western slimes a little bit to see if there's any interesting pre-D&D tid-bits I can find.
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Ok, thought so! I found it!
The earliest appearance of the FAR more threatening Western-themed slimes appears to be the C-rate monster movie, "The Blob," released in 1958.
In this story, there was an amorphous ball of goo that came from outer space and ate everything it touched. In the process, it would become bigger and bigger until it is larger than a building. (Note the similar origin story to the Venom Symbiote from Spider Man.)
The thing is finally defeated when it is lured onto a palate and air-lifted into the Anartic, using cold to stop it's metabolism and thus it's growth.
Around the same period of time, there started to be more and more stories, such as Venom from Spider Man, that had threatening amorphous goo-like things as the antagonistic force in the story. In all cases, these amorphous creatures were portrayed as a VERY large threat.
So, the original origin of slimes seems to have coincided with the advent of the scientific age and the space age, as these early slime-like creatures were almost always from outer space.
It was, as always, Dungeons and Dragons that radically changed the portrayal of slimes for the entire world. However, this is quite likely the first time I've gotten one where they took a sci-fi creature and turned it into a fantasy creature.
D&D oozes (as they called them) were trap-monsters. They put a great deal of thought into how these creatures feed and survive, and they are portrayed as similar in nature to some kind of low-mobility predatory plant, except that they are also amorphous. They have a low movement speed, but that is about the only weak thing about them. All D&D slimes have a reasonably high amount of health, almost always have some method of blending in with the surroundings and looking natural in their environment, and if prey happens to stumble into their trap then they have some method of immobilizing them.
D&D slimes are largely categorized into 3 categories.
Gelatinous types. These types have more physical structure, often being a large cube or sphere of some kind. They slowly ooze along the ground, eating pieces of small debris that they pull into their bodies. They are made of a fairly clear substance, so they are very difficult to see in low light. You can even be looking right at one of these slimes and the only way you will see it is either if light and visibility is good, or if it has picked up something and that "something" is suspended in the gelatinous creature.
The gelatinous type D&D slimes are the closest in nature to Eastern slimes. Only, they are a lot stronger. They are fairly easy to defeat once seen since, while they have a lot of health, they also move slowly and have few options for fighting back other than to dissolve the weapon as it passes through their body. Something that would require the person attempting to slay it to be rather stupid to allow to happen, as it would require them sticking the weapon into the creature and leaving it there for an excessive amount of time.
The next type is camouflaged types. These tend to be far more amorphous than the gelatinous types, and are also a greater threat. They tend to conform to the contours of a natural stone surface of some kind, and are usually found in natural caves, usually in moist areas. A hapless adventurer can easily mistake a camouflaged-type slime for pond-scum of some form, and may simply proceed on through while only being cautious of the possibility that they might slip and fall.
This type has adapted to only begin releasing it's acid after it's body has been disturbed. As such, unless you have very good shoes made of non-organic material, it will begin dissolving your feet around the same time you have made it 33% of the way through the area the slime covers. A point at which it is very difficult to escape before your feet have dissolved to the point where movement becomes impossible. This makes camouflaged slimes particularly nasty.
The third type is noxious type oozes. These ones can also have features of either of the above two types as well, either being non-mobile camouflaged types or more mobile gelatin-like. However, the gel-like noxious slimes usually are more opaque and easier to spot than the regular gelatin types.
Noxious slimes, when disturbed or damaged, will release some form of noxious fumes into the air which will have some form of sleep or paralysis effect. After incapacitating their pray, a noxious-type slime will envelop that prey and begin dissolving it.
It was, in fact, after D&D was already a thing that Dragon Quest came onto the scene. The makers of Dragon Quest have even cited D&D as their inspiration for the making of the game.
However, it seems the makers of Dragon Quest decided to make some slimes which somewhat resembled the gelatin-like oozes of D&D into their starting low-rank enemies. This was likely done for ease of animation, but this culturally solidified the concept of the slimes in the Eastern minds as low-rank and non-threatening enemies, quite the contrary to the pre-existing Western view on slimes.
From there, most people know the rest of the story. Western slimes have really not developed much since early D&D. Most of the carrying on of this creature has been via Eastern fiction. However, Western RPGs do still tend to favor D&D slimes over the weaker JRPG counterparts. It's only that Western RPGs have not really done much to evolve the concept and continue to go back to the source, where as Japanese Web Novels have continued to push and evolve the concept of Eastern Dragon Quest - based slimes.
I am going to call this one here, unless someone wants to show interest in me continuing into the Web Novel - based evolution of the concept.
