And some of it is historical, embedded into the evolution of those myths. They change to suit the needs of the teller, references to real people and places get lost along the way and new ones are put in. It's how stories roll.
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I've so often read yew being used as a magical material in an American novel about fairies, and it's just a cool word. But those scraps of folklore aren't random. It's not until I saw the surreal quiet around a yew tree (it's mildly poisonous) that I understood.
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Or half-broken rows of hawthorn still marking out old field borders. Mistletoe thriving strange & surreal atop seemingly dead trees. My point isn't that these things are sacred or inalterable, so much as I wonder about what it means when stories are uprooted, become an aesthetic
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And in part because I'm myself uprooted, that I am struggling to find my voice when being inspired by East Asian folklore. Perhaps selfishly, I want that moment of understanding I had when sitting under a yew tree and realising how intertwined it is with death.
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I don't feel the same when I see a peony, a flower I only ever see potted and pruned. I don't think I understand why it is king of the flowers, why a man could be executed for proclaiming that the crimson is superior (well, I do know, it's a political dunk)
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I'm not trying to imply diaspora are somehow not qualified to write whatever the fuck the want. Plus, modernity and cultural change can just as easily isolate one from why a story or phrase is the way it is. Not to mention folk (also pronounced faux) etymologies.
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I'm thinking about how fantastical otherworlds of folklore often start out as real places, ones that can be traveled to physically and then as knowledge pushes back the borders of the known, these places become abstract, spiritual and then finally, metaphors.
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I stress that it's not that ancient people are idiots that don't understand fiction so much as travel to these other worlds is always viscerally physical. So Arcadia is both a real place in the real world an also a literary, mythological and folkloric construct.
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And there's a level where when more non-Arcadians started realising the real world Arcadia seems less exciting than promised, the mythic travel there in your dreams Arcadia is born. I dunno, read any medieval travelogue. Or the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
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Speaking of folklore born from very specific references, I am pretty convinced that Tōfu-kozō is meant as a joke on overly enthusiastic tofu sellers thrusting samples in your face during the Edo period.pic.twitter.com/V9zPstoj2b
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I cannot stress enough that this isn't some sort of yearning for a lost authenticity so much as a desire to understand where folklore comes from and allowing that to shape how I use it. Where do these seemingly outlandish, exotic, whimsical ideas come from.
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At the same time, it can sometimes feel demystifying. Santa coming down the chimney can seem whimsical. Knowing it's from a Finnish story, set in a home built half underground with chimney and roof being the same opening... it can feel less "fun"?
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Or like, mermaids might have been born from the imagination of horny sailors seeing manatees but they're definitely become more than that. So much more has been added to the story. And more is being added still.
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On the subject of mermaids, I recommend Jen Campbell's "Aquarium Girl" and "The beginning of the World In the Middle of The Night", incidentally. Trung Le Nguyen's "The Magic Fish". Imogen Hermes Gower's "The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock".
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Maybe there's some sort of difference between how I encounter mermaids and yew trees, insofar as the former feels like a vast kaleidoscope of stories and meanings, whereas the latter often appears only as an aesthetic detail.
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I wonder sometimes how things from the present will get mythologised, when will we lose the things that anchor these phrases and metaphors and they become an empty aesthetic, what new meaning will they accrete.
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Godzilla accreted symbolism. Beginning as thid absolute monstrous thing of consequence and guilt in the old Japanese films. While in these new US versions, he is the God of Nature. And in between he has been a cute animated lizard teaching lessons about friendship.
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It's deeply unexamined within popular anglophone discourse but I'm also painfully aware of how much of "Chinese" mythology is a blend of regional traditions and monstrous caricatures of conquered people. So much of it is baked into paradigms that have been used for centuries.
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And that's being used as fuel in popular chinese fantasy now. Which themselves subvert and repurpose. Which itself inspires a new generation of diaspora writers looking to reconnect with their roots. By which I mean me. So much of my imagination is shaped by c-dramas.
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Does it matter then the word for shaman/witch might have come from Persian? Or the fact that Mulan might be a Turkic name meaning Cosmic Deer and thus has nothing to do with magnolias?
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I love Jin Yong's work, but "The Book and the Sword" has a decidedly racist depiction of Uighur people. For all that it may acknowledge brutal colonialism of the Manchus, it is also all about hold this means they're now one with the Han. Not the mention exotic love interests.
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I keep meaning to write something about that but I'm not sure anyone else has read book and sword and it's not like it has had any prestige drama adaptions lately so it all seems a bit academic.
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Anyway, I have drifted from my original point enough. Cannot stress enough that this isn't some sort of desire for an original authentic version of stories that we must stay true to all cost. It's more thread of navel gazing of what it all "means".
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