@talus-the-broken i’m Not Gonna Keep Harping On This On Someone Else’s Post Because I’m Not Going

@talus-the-broken i’m not gonna keep harping on this on someone else’s post because i’m not going to be rude to the op, but yeah, let’s get into it

popular nonacademic ideas about mythology don’t define what greek mythic tradition is. there might not be a difference to the “general public” because they don’t know what the difference is, and taking their definition of mythology as just as legitimate as the accepted academic definition of mythic tradition is blatantly anti-intellectual and ridiculous. you and other people making this argument are reifying the idea that humanities aren’t a legitimate discipline. accepting the idea that there’s no meaningful difference to the layman so anything that anyone claims without any citations or background knowledge (even to a basic level!) can and should be given equal weight is simply justifying the spread of misinformation about ancient greek culture, history, literature, and religion. maybe that doesn’t seem important to you, but again. blatantly anti-intellectual and destructive to the perception of history as a discipline 

there’s no denying the way that ancient mediterranean studies as a field has a long history of reinforcing regressive social standards, perpetuating racism, sexism, homophobia, etc to this day. it’s a huge problem. it’s also, in my experience, what you discuss on day 1 of an intro classics course. it’s also been written about and widely discussed since the 80s with the beginning of the black athena movement. right now, it’s a subject of much controversy and debate about how to progress as a field. also, i have to ask: what field of study doesn’t have a history of and is still impacted by systemic oppression and bias? there are problems of accessibility in every discipline of academia. including science, if we continue the comparison. biology has been used to legitimize racism for hundreds of years. do we reject biology as a field or do we reject the scholarship that is entrenched in bigotry and work to do better going forward as a field? you need to learn critical thinking skills and recognizing legitimate sources of information, if you’re taking everything (anything!) at face value, you’re a bad historian. and of course much information has been lost to time, but that is not the same as “much of history is lost.” that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of history as an academic field, especially one as interdisciplinary as and covering as long of a timespan as ancient mediterranean studies. although we only have like, what, 1% of the literature spanning all of the time that we call antiquity? that’s still more writing than any person could even come close to reading in their lifetime. it doesn’t mean we don’t know anything and modern historians are just making shit up. not to mention archaeological evidence lol 

on the question of separating the “true” from modern fabrication, or what you call “fanfiction of the myths,” for the layman: look at the texts from antiquity that we have. we don’t have to wonder what these stories were because we have them. we have the text of the iliad. we have the text of hesiodic poetry. we have the text of many greek tragedies. and guess what? they are translated! they are free online! there are resources to understand these texts free online! there is no excuse to post unfounded opinions based on misinformation when you could just. not. you could read the work that you want to say something about before making baseless claims about it on the internet lol and the way you talk about sources of mythology, i have more than a modicum of doubt that you have read anything beyond bulfinch and text posts on tumblr.edu, so i can hardly count you as a reliable source of information on the topic 

so. you say that the differences between adaptations is time. that is part of it actually! but what aren’t you getting about “a mythology that is no longer naturally developing over time doesn’t include works written thousands of years after the culture itself doesn’t exist anymore.” that’s an incredibly important distinction because if you give equal weight to these stories as part of ancient greek mythic tradition, you are once again supporting the spread of misinformation about ancient greek culture, history, literature, and religion. and it is so egotistical and entitled to act like we can be equal contributors to the history, literature, and religion of a culture that we don’t belong to. that doesn’t exist anymore. and if you’re so concerned about people using mythology to justify racism and imperialism, maybe you shouldn’t be reifying the propaganda that all “western culture” is derived from and has a stake in and overlaps significantly with ancient “greco-roman” culture, that we are a part of this tradition and lineage, because we’re not. modern greek culture is not. also, to say that these stories were written by “random writers” is to once again show a fundamental inability to understand that greek mythic tradition developed orally over centuries and was a part of everyday life and culture. homer isn’t a “random writer,” it’s a name that was assigned to a figure who is essentially mythological in his own right, and it’s still used today as shorthand attribution and as a way to talk about the many aoidoi who established and continued the stories of epic tradition across generations. homeric epic was written down somewhere in the 8th century BCE but existed in oral tradition well before that. the mythic pool of traditions developed the same way. this shit doesn’t exist in a vacuum. it’s not like writing fanfiction for a fucking marvel movie in the year of 2022 CE

also i don’t get why you keep harping on the validity of modern adaptations that deviate from the “original” story. i don’t care about that at all and i have actively enjoyed adaptations that are wildly different from their mythological basis (autobiography of red for example). so. i will try to say this as clearly as possible to avoid further confusion: modern adaptations of mythology matter because of what it says about our society. it’s a legitimate part of our canon of literature. we should be critical about it based on what it means for us, what they changes the author chooses to make means for us. it is not part of the ancient greek canon for the reasons i have already stated multiple times. it is distinct from greek mythology. if you want to call it fanfiction because you can’t engage with literature in any other way, fine. but writing in general is not fanfiction (again: modern original fiction) and mythology is not fanfiction 

and so we come to the ludicrous idea that any piece of writing can arbitrarily be called fanfiction because it is “based on” something, meaning any aspect of reality (biology is just fanfiction of animals! physics is just fanfiction of the forces of nature! history is just fanfiction of the past! if you can’t see why that’s stupid, you’re a lost cause). you still have not defined “fanfiction” in a meaningful way, but apply the term to whatever literature you feel like. here’s a definition for you: fanfiction is a genre of writing developed in the late 1900s at the advent of the internet, referring to works written based on another author’s work, existing outside of that work’s canon, as a way to further explore the characters, setting, or themes of a story (addendum 1: often written by nonprofessionals and then self published, addendum 2: often, but not necessarily, of a sexual nature). that is what i mean by “fanfiction” and i believe it aligns with most people’s definition of it. don’t take my word for it, though! always demand those sources! here’s the definition and graph of use over time from the oxford dictionary:

to sum up. basically your argument is: 1) the layperson makes no distinction between oversimplified mythology or adaptations vs the actual ancient greek mythological tradition, so we shouldn’t either. 2) scholarship around mythology and derivative works have been influenced by bias and prejudice, so it doesn’t matter how we talk about mythology. 3) we don’t really know anything about these made up stories written by random people in antiquity so made up stories written by random people in the modern era should have equal weight in the discussion of the ancient greek pool of traditions. anything i missed? because i believe i have covered why each of these points is extremely flawed 

and i still haven’t seen an answer on the following: why do you guys insist on taking the idea that fanfiction isn’t inherently garbage to the most radical opposite extreme possible? do you think you’re somehow legitimizing fanfiction? or do you think you’re making history and literature more “accessible” by dumbing it down until it’s unrecognizable?

anyway, you said it yourself: “[F]or all practical purposes, to the general public there IS no difference. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be.” i agree! there is a difference and there should be a difference and we should not reify the idea that there is no difference even if it seems like it doesn’t matter, because somehow it has become a popularly held belief that engaging with mythology as if it is a fandom on the internet is just as legitimate as rigorous scholarship on the same subject to the point that the most common interpretations of these myths are based on misinformation and defended with anti-intellectual rhetoric, much of which is steeped in socially regressive views, and that speaks to a bigger problem of media illiteracy and anti-intellectualism that extends beyond shipping discourse or what have you on this shitty ass website 

sorry about the bulfinch/bullfinch inconsistency though, i liked the “bullshit mythology” pun