I just don't think that a commercial product that everyone who makes and consumes it understands is pure fiction designed to entertain the viewer as a customer is the same thing as "mythology"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Lithobolos
Yes, it does a lot of the things mythology does, it is in many ways analogous to mythology or "what we have instead of mythology" Fine When you say it actually is mythology you're ignoring a lot of obvious facts as though they just don't matter and that's annoying
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Lithobolos
It's like when people say stuff like "Football is my religion" and in some broad anthropological sense that's true and insightful and yet if you actually literally mean it and try to push it as literally true it's just stupid No it's not
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Lithobolos
"American civil religion" is definitely a thing, even among some people who are militantly "anti-religious"
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Replying to @LizardOrman @Lithobolos
Okay see yes and I would say that as hokey as you might find it there is actual literal "American mythology" that goes with the American civic religion that actually fits the definition of mythology much better than any fiction created for commercial media
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I mean, sure, George Washington chopping down the cherry tree has much less cultural relevance than Spider-Man (although not ZERO relevance, looking at the success of stuff like Hamilton)
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I think you can make a case that the characters are mythological figures, but the specific movies are not; they're not canonical in any usual way, and it's marked by the fact that the canon is always changing.
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I think comic book superheroes could in theory become folktales that then become myths under the right circumstances (but so could anything) I also think, however, that they won't Not under any foreseeable near future circumstances anyway
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
The most literal way this could actually happen is if we had a big nuclear war, the electricity grid collapse and all access to digital media was lost Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play was about this (people's memories of The Simpsons warping into an oral tradition in the future)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
But otherwise no The forces of mass media actively fight against it In the play the beginning of the mutation of the episode into actual folklore starts with people bickering and fighting and getting anxious because looking up the real episode has become impossible
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(Whereas we live in a real world where looking up the canon quote from the real episode has never been easier and will only get easier over time)
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Yeah, I mean, we're nowhere near a time when the source material is not readily available. But I think the shift will be if there starts to be many rival canons for the same underlying figure. The closest we are now is probably Sherlock, right?
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
The original canon of Sherlock Holmes is, of course, widely available, but it's also not really treated as being *canonical* any more. You can freely contradict it (starting with the time period) and alter the details at will.
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