Meta Monday: Myth and narrative
May. 4th, 2015 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dhampyresaHi! Welcome to Meta Monday, in which I go tl;dr about stuff.
Today, I coined the term "ficframed", which is to fic ideas what earwormed is to songs. They dig into your brain and won't leave.
Well, that was an easy meta post to write.
More seriously, I'm going to answer![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
taiyou_to_tsuki: "Since you've read a fair bit of stories based on mythology-- how do you feel about translating characters from a mythic to a literary narrative? Are there any cases where you have felt a deity/other mythical being to be misinterpreted by the author?"
I've read a lot of mythology books and books based on mythology. Most recently, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Heroes of Olympus series(es?) and Joanne Harris' Runemarks series. I'm not counting things that are only distantly related to myths like the Asgardian side of the Marvel Universe, but I've read a lot of that, too.
I think the biggest mistake people can make when trying to turn myths into stories is to forget that gods aren't just humans writ large. They are that, yes, but they're not just that.
The Morrígan isn't just some woman with powers and a grudge against Cúchulainn. She is the frenzy of battle made animate.
But you must never forget, either, that it is a rare god who is god of one thing only. People are complex and gods even more so. In particular, the longer a religion has had to evolve the more its gods will have changed with it. Ancient Egyptian mythology in particular has changed a lot in the, oh, three thousand years and more it was the majority religion in Egypt. A particularly striking example is Isis going from a folk hero to a goddess in her own right. (You could also look at the evolution of the afterlife, because there's a lot more evidence of that on account of a lot of what we know about Ancient Egypt being due to being found in graves and pyramids. Also, I wrote a fic about both of those.)
Still, most gods are gods of more than one thing. And even often things that are unrelated or contradictory.
Odin isn't simply the god of the gallows, he's also the god of knowledge. Sekhmet isn't simply divine wrath made flesh, she's also goddess of healing.
Which brings me to my third point. People have believed in the gods, these gods, for hundreds and thousands of years. Some people still do. If you're going to write about them, the least you can do is treat them with respect.
I don't care if you think your religion holds the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, that doesn't give you free reign to mock other people's beliefs. Same goes for if you're an atheist.
Even if things look ridiculous to you, to the people who believe(d) they don't.
Anyway, all this being said, translating myths to a narrative also has the added problem that myths are often not narratives as a whole. The Loki who kills Balder is a sensibly different Loki from the Loki who rescues Idunn from Tjazi or the one who shoves Thor in a dress then tags along to Jotunheim. You can build a narrative that ties all of the myths of Loki together -- I should know, I've done it -- but the point is you have to build that narrative.
The myths never give you any narrative beyond the one myths you're reading. Myths care very little for consistency. Don't believe me? Okay, pop quizz: In Greek mythology, who is older between Athena and Hermes? (Seriously, if you do know, please tell me because I have no fucking idea.)
If you're going to write about myths, you're going to have to make choices and a lot of them. Which myths are true? Even "all of them" doesn't solve any of your problems, because then you have to explain how that's possible (see above about Isis and the snake vs Isis as sister to Seth, for one example).
You're going to have to make choice on symbolism and cut out part os the gods' attributes. Do you really need Odin as god of poetry if Bragi's in the room?
You're going to have to wrangle completely different creation myths, from the same mythology. In the Kelavala, the world/universe was sung into being by Ilmatar, but the sky was also forged by Ilmarinen. (And that's after Elias Lönnrot went through all the trouble of collecting and turning Finnish/Karelian myths into a narrative.)
Sure, you can just decide to not care about any of that, but then you're not really writing a narrative-formed-from-myth. You're writing myth, or you're writing something that doesn't focus on the narrative of the myths, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Heroes of Olympus, for example, is based on myths (Greek/Roman), but is not narrative-formed-from-myth. It's narrative-around-myth. (This is proof you can absolutely write narrative-around-myth while making some choices re:the myths, btw.)
Runemarks (and Runelight) are also narrative-around-myth. The Gospel of Loki, by contrast, even though it's by the same author and explicitly written in the same universe as a prequel, is narrative-formed-from-myth.
As for the second question, it is very easily answered.
MORGANE. The entire English-speaking world seems to be under the collective delusion that Morgane is the villain of the Arturian mythos, even though Merlin is right there.
I am utterly baffled by this. (No lie, I pretend all English-speaking Arturian mythos-related stuff either doesn't exist or hails from the mirror universe. Merlin as an unambiguous good guy. What.)
Aside from this tragic misunderstanding, there are several cases I can think of of gods being misinterpreted by the authors. Instead of naming those authors, I'm going to name the gods, which will be a lot faster and a lot easier to show similarities, because I have a theory for why this happens.
Loki, Hades, Sethwalk into a bar.
These three often get cast as unrepetantly evil to oppose our unrepetantly good ~heroes~. This erases any and all nuance that could be found in their story.
Loki has excellent reasons to turn against Odin and Asgard. They banish three of his children, enslave another and, oh, turn two of them into wolves so they can tear each other apart, then tie him up with the entrails of the one who died. I don't know about you, but I'd be bitter too.
Hades is, by all mythological accounts, a complete stick in the mud, who has better things to deal with than taking over the world. (What for?)
Seth, on the other hand... Well, I'm going to point out that Plutarch is the oldest source we have that gices a complete picture of Osiris' murder and I cannot possibly the only one who thinks it's odd that a Greek is considered teh authority on something that's often held up as central to Egyptian mythology. I'll also point out that Seth is also Pharaoh's protector. Seth is a desert god, a destructive force, but destructive doesn't mean evil. It depends what you do with it. One of the things Seth does with it is fight Apophis, the serpent who would kill the sun (god).
Why are these gods cast as capital-E evil, when they're not? Because Christianity. Christianity, especially certain branches of it (Abligensians, anyone?), is very fond of imagining the world as being split in two with good on one side and evil on the other. As such, Loki/Hades/Seth often takes on the role of Satan in what is more find-and(replace Bible fanfic than myth-based narrative.
Compare, for example, the way Loki and Hermes are treated. They're both tricksters, aren't they? (So's Seth, by the way.) And yet, when's the last time you saw Hermes cast as the bad guy? Why Hades and not him? After all, Hades just rules the dead, Hermes actually carries souls to the afterlife.
My point is that you can play "pin the evil" on pretty much any god you like. Either that or the reason Hermes is never the bad guy is that he dresses far too fabulously for it.
(Only somewhat related to the above: of the three tricksters I've named -- Loki, Seth, Hermes -- all of them are arguably* some variant of LGBTQ, inasmuch as that's a label that has any sense in this context.)
(Also, I have above referred to the King of Egypt as Pharaoh, which is a misnomer. The first Pharaoh is Tutmosis III, all rulers of Ancient Egyt before him are Kings of Egypt, up to and including Hatchepsut, making her, in fact, the last king of Egypt.)
*See the comments to the dreamwidth version of this post.
Sweet Tanith, this got long!
Next week, I'll looking at AUs.
(I need some sort of meta icon.)
Today, I coined the term "ficframed", which is to fic ideas what earwormed is to songs. They dig into your brain and won't leave.
Well, that was an easy meta post to write.
More seriously, I'm going to answer
taiyou_to_tsuki: "Since you've read a fair bit of stories based on mythology-- how do you feel about translating characters from a mythic to a literary narrative? Are there any cases where you have felt a deity/other mythical being to be misinterpreted by the author?"I've read a lot of mythology books and books based on mythology. Most recently, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Heroes of Olympus series(es?) and Joanne Harris' Runemarks series. I'm not counting things that are only distantly related to myths like the Asgardian side of the Marvel Universe, but I've read a lot of that, too.
I think the biggest mistake people can make when trying to turn myths into stories is to forget that gods aren't just humans writ large. They are that, yes, but they're not just that.
The Morrígan isn't just some woman with powers and a grudge against Cúchulainn. She is the frenzy of battle made animate.
But you must never forget, either, that it is a rare god who is god of one thing only. People are complex and gods even more so. In particular, the longer a religion has had to evolve the more its gods will have changed with it. Ancient Egyptian mythology in particular has changed a lot in the, oh, three thousand years and more it was the majority religion in Egypt. A particularly striking example is Isis going from a folk hero to a goddess in her own right. (You could also look at the evolution of the afterlife, because there's a lot more evidence of that on account of a lot of what we know about Ancient Egypt being due to being found in graves and pyramids. Also, I wrote a fic about both of those.)
Still, most gods are gods of more than one thing. And even often things that are unrelated or contradictory.
Odin isn't simply the god of the gallows, he's also the god of knowledge. Sekhmet isn't simply divine wrath made flesh, she's also goddess of healing.
Which brings me to my third point. People have believed in the gods, these gods, for hundreds and thousands of years. Some people still do. If you're going to write about them, the least you can do is treat them with respect.
I don't care if you think your religion holds the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, that doesn't give you free reign to mock other people's beliefs. Same goes for if you're an atheist.
Even if things look ridiculous to you, to the people who believe(d) they don't.
Anyway, all this being said, translating myths to a narrative also has the added problem that myths are often not narratives as a whole. The Loki who kills Balder is a sensibly different Loki from the Loki who rescues Idunn from Tjazi or the one who shoves Thor in a dress then tags along to Jotunheim. You can build a narrative that ties all of the myths of Loki together -- I should know, I've done it -- but the point is you have to build that narrative.
The myths never give you any narrative beyond the one myths you're reading. Myths care very little for consistency. Don't believe me? Okay, pop quizz: In Greek mythology, who is older between Athena and Hermes? (Seriously, if you do know, please tell me because I have no fucking idea.)
If you're going to write about myths, you're going to have to make choices and a lot of them. Which myths are true? Even "all of them" doesn't solve any of your problems, because then you have to explain how that's possible (see above about Isis and the snake vs Isis as sister to Seth, for one example).
You're going to have to make choice on symbolism and cut out part os the gods' attributes. Do you really need Odin as god of poetry if Bragi's in the room?
You're going to have to wrangle completely different creation myths, from the same mythology. In the Kelavala, the world/universe was sung into being by Ilmatar, but the sky was also forged by Ilmarinen. (And that's after Elias Lönnrot went through all the trouble of collecting and turning Finnish/Karelian myths into a narrative.)
Sure, you can just decide to not care about any of that, but then you're not really writing a narrative-formed-from-myth. You're writing myth, or you're writing something that doesn't focus on the narrative of the myths, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Heroes of Olympus, for example, is based on myths (Greek/Roman), but is not narrative-formed-from-myth. It's narrative-around-myth. (This is proof you can absolutely write narrative-around-myth while making some choices re:the myths, btw.)
Runemarks (and Runelight) are also narrative-around-myth. The Gospel of Loki, by contrast, even though it's by the same author and explicitly written in the same universe as a prequel, is narrative-formed-from-myth.
As for the second question, it is very easily answered.
MORGANE. The entire English-speaking world seems to be under the collective delusion that Morgane is the villain of the Arturian mythos, even though Merlin is right there.
I am utterly baffled by this. (No lie, I pretend all English-speaking Arturian mythos-related stuff either doesn't exist or hails from the mirror universe. Merlin as an unambiguous good guy. What.)
Aside from this tragic misunderstanding, there are several cases I can think of of gods being misinterpreted by the authors. Instead of naming those authors, I'm going to name the gods, which will be a lot faster and a lot easier to show similarities, because I have a theory for why this happens.
Loki, Hades, Seth
These three often get cast as unrepetantly evil to oppose our unrepetantly good ~heroes~. This erases any and all nuance that could be found in their story.
Loki has excellent reasons to turn against Odin and Asgard. They banish three of his children, enslave another and, oh, turn two of them into wolves so they can tear each other apart, then tie him up with the entrails of the one who died. I don't know about you, but I'd be bitter too.
Hades is, by all mythological accounts, a complete stick in the mud, who has better things to deal with than taking over the world. (What for?)
Seth, on the other hand... Well, I'm going to point out that Plutarch is the oldest source we have that gices a complete picture of Osiris' murder and I cannot possibly the only one who thinks it's odd that a Greek is considered teh authority on something that's often held up as central to Egyptian mythology. I'll also point out that Seth is also Pharaoh's protector. Seth is a desert god, a destructive force, but destructive doesn't mean evil. It depends what you do with it. One of the things Seth does with it is fight Apophis, the serpent who would kill the sun (god).
Why are these gods cast as capital-E evil, when they're not? Because Christianity. Christianity, especially certain branches of it (Abligensians, anyone?), is very fond of imagining the world as being split in two with good on one side and evil on the other. As such, Loki/Hades/Seth often takes on the role of Satan in what is more find-and(replace Bible fanfic than myth-based narrative.
Compare, for example, the way Loki and Hermes are treated. They're both tricksters, aren't they? (So's Seth, by the way.) And yet, when's the last time you saw Hermes cast as the bad guy? Why Hades and not him? After all, Hades just rules the dead, Hermes actually carries souls to the afterlife.
My point is that you can play "pin the evil" on pretty much any god you like. Either that or the reason Hermes is never the bad guy is that he dresses far too fabulously for it.
(Only somewhat related to the above: of the three tricksters I've named -- Loki, Seth, Hermes -- all of them are arguably* some variant of LGBTQ, inasmuch as that's a label that has any sense in this context.)
(Also, I have above referred to the King of Egypt as Pharaoh, which is a misnomer. The first Pharaoh is Tutmosis III, all rulers of Ancient Egyt before him are Kings of Egypt, up to and including Hatchepsut, making her, in fact, the last king of Egypt.)
*See the comments to the dreamwidth version of this post.
Sweet Tanith, this got long!
Next week, I'll looking at AUs.
(I need some sort of meta icon.)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-11 06:52 am (UTC)And your account that "I was also thinking of a specific incident where I had to explain to someone that to the people who built the pyramids was not a waste of ressources because, even though the concept felt ridiculous to him, to them it upheld the proper order of the universe and prevented the end of the world (/gross oversimplification)." Yeah, see, that is not what I thought of when I thought of things that would count as making fun of myth, and I agree that you should at least understand why people think the things they think. (Or thought the things they thought.) If you can't sympathise, you can't really handle writing about it, right?
On to substantive points that aren't just "yeah, I see now".
So, I disagree that anyone who doesn't believe in a thing shouldn't make fun of it, if you are also extending the definition of making fun of things to include things more like what I'm thinking of (I'm thinking more along the lines of snarky nicknames, irreverent jokes, all that stuff, not "your entire worldview is wrong and that's hilarious"). On the other hand, that discussion would take us way off topic because the reasons for this stem from watching the misuse of similar concepts developed for social justice that end up instead hurting the very people they're supposed to protect. So, I get maybe a little twitchy about "only X can say Y" for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand.
The heart-eating thing: all of that is so very unclear, of course, and trying to reconcile it with other parts of the myths is not really workable. However! I don't think this incident makes him LGBT for three reasons:
1. The closest I've seen to a coherent narrative here (we need a narrative to conclude anything about Loki's desires or identity, which is what defines LGBT for us, even if it doesn't define fairy/argr for vikings) is that Gullveig shows up to try to *handwave handwave something ominous* and the Aesir try to kill her, but she revives, so they try again, but she revives (from her intact heart), and also now she's really angry, so it occurs to them to do something about that heart that she's regenerating from, so Loki eats it. Not quite coerced in the same sense as Sleipnir, but not really recreational cannibalism, either. The only motive it sheds light on is not dying, which is not related to LGBT.
2. In fact, there's nothing we would consider related to sex or gender in there at all. This is not a typical means of getting pregnant, after all. It might well make him a fairy by their definitions, but it doesn't make him LGBT by our definitions.
3. What about the argument that if he uses male pronouns and a masculine name and gets pregnant he's a trans man? Well, for one thing, this incident would be a particularly poor one to use for that argument if you wanted to make it, because getting pregnant from eating someone's heart is just as unlikely as a cis man getting pregnant at all.
(More hypocrisy: the trans guy because male and pregnant argument is one I thought of because I've made it before. :P)
And thank you for taking the time to respond to such a long comment!
(Also: I wrote Gylfaginning framing-story fic because of this conversation. Not sure if you'll like it but since its existence is partly your fault...)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-20 10:02 pm (UTC)It's entirely possible I worded things badly. I tend to write these posts in the evenings and all in a go, which doesn't always lend itself to being comprehensible, coherent and concise. But I do think that the dual nature of the gods is something that must be dealt with somehow. Like, Loki's story can be both "Man makes friend. Friend betrays Man. Man takes revenge." (...typing it this way I realise it works both ways with Odin and Loki) and "Man brings fire into home. Man neglects fire. Fire burns down home".
My point is less "only X can say Y" than it is "people who are not X should think before saying Y", but that's very nebulous and basically a subset of "people should think before they talk".
All good points! And since LGBT does rely on personal identification, there's no way to say Loki is definitely LGBT, short of someone somewhere becoming a prophet. (Let me edit the post to "arguably LGBT", then.)
I try to reply to all the comments I get, even if it takes me a while.
(I do like it!)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-21 06:03 pm (UTC)No problem!
Like, Loki's story can be both "Man makes friend. Friend betrays Man. Man takes revenge." (...typing it this way I realise it works both ways with Odin and Loki) and "Man brings fire into home. Man neglects fire. Fire burns down home".
It very much can. Also, while we're talking myth-logic* interpretations, I'm fond of "society attempts to control things. Things include entropy. Society tries to keep entropy from happening by avoiding change entirely. This works for a while, then fails truly catastrophically." (Which is surprisingly close to my favorite story-logic interpretation: "Man gets everything. Man tries to keep everything. In trying to eliminate uncertainty he sows the seeds of his own undoing. It gets worse.")
*I wasn't going to be like "I talked about this too!" before, but it's faster to link you to Myth, Religion, Story than to redefine "myth logic" here. Though the concept is clearly not new to you.
My point is less "only X can say Y" than it is "people who are not X should think before saying Y", but that's very nebulous and basically a subset of "people should think before they talk".
Yeah, I can get behind that.
I sort of feel bad for, IDK, taking representation away or something, but on the other hand it feels really important to harp on how things like having sex to avoid death and getting pregnant by accident and choosing not to end the pregnancy don't actually define sexual orientation. So yeah. "Arguably"-- that's a really excellent word choice.
Anyway, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you! :)