Category: mythology

7 Native American Monsters @npishak #MythologyMonday #MythologyMonandæg #DnD #ADnD #RPG

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Great Shatner’s ghost, I love mythology. Here’s a link to an article on Native American monsters care of Natasha Ishak. Because of this blog’s current focus on Dungeons & Dragons, I note that some of these monsters don’t appear in these precise forms in any RPGs I’ve played or read. There are similarities, of course, but some of these represent variations of what I’ve seen, so there’s some room for inspiration here. This is true despite how extensive the gaming library is.

Mythology is an eternal fountain of ideas. There’s always more you can grab from it.

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Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to nor endorsed the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)


You Forgot Orthrus #MythologyMonday #MythologyMonandæg #Orthrus

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100th day in a row with a post!

I found this moderately funny Venn diagram.

Cute, right? Well, as any fan of Clash of the Titans will tell you, it’s incomplete. Here’s my revised version.

C’mon, man. Orthrus was a player in the 10th labor of Heracles. He deserves your remembrance.

Capitalization matters too.

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Legendary Watch: The Green Knight @joeledgerton1 @ralphineson @BarryKeoghan @A24 @tracydeonn #MythologyMonday #MythologyMonandæg #TheGreenKnight #GoodWatch

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Last Saturday, I did something that I rarely do: I took a nap. It’s probably been about a year since I did that, and I haven’t taken naps more frequently than that since college. I also did something else that I hadn’t done since September: I went to the movies. I used to do that almost every Sunday, but with the pandemic, that’s non longer common practice.

I think these two things are connected. I took a nap, felt revitalized, and figured I see a movie at a late hour. I bought a ticket to Old and almost immediately regretted it. I wanted to see The Green Knight first and didn’t realize it had been released. Fortunately, Old ended right about the the Green Knight‘s start time. With previews, I didn’t miss a thing.

The Green Knight dragged at times, but I’ve come to expect that from movies about legend and mythology. We sometimes say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s certainly true of a movie. As a result, most myths can be told in 45-60 minutes on film. Filmmakers have two choices: borrow material from other myths and legends or fill in the story with creations of their own. I usually see the former, but in this case, it was the latter as far as I could tell. If they were borrowing from specific myths and legends, I didn’t recognize them. This is where it dragged, but for an apologist for such things, I still enjoyed it.

This also means that it’s probably not the story you know beyond the broad strokes. Besides the original filler, the filmmaker took some liberties with the story, but this can hardly be considered inappropriate. From generation through generation, Arthurian legend is essentially a collection of fan fiction. It appears to have changed with almost every telling of a story. Who’s to say that the filmmaker is wrong for doing their own thing?

The cast was great, BTW.

I give it a B+, but remember that comes from an apologist. YMMV. Old was good too, but I like everything M. Night Shamalamadingdong does, even including the much-maligned The Village. So yeah, YMMV.

So, now that this is over with, let’s gear back up for my continuation of my 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons revisit by asking why the hell haven’t I seen the Green Knight appear in any official D&D text after the original Deities and Demigods? Even in that source, there was very little provided by the description. What villain could provide a greater hook than one whose villainy is merely teaching you a valuable lesson? FYI, A24 created an RPG based on the movie, which they released about a year ago. Googling it provides several reviews of it from CBR.com, Polygon, and others.

I didn’t think there’d be a post-credit scene in a movie like The Green Knight, so I left too early. Oops.

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NASA Is Sexist! @NASA #NASA #Artemis #MythologyMonday #MythologyMonandæg

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Seriously, how hard was it to get this right, space nerds?

I’m actually more offended that the meme-maker didn’t capitalize, “Apollo.”

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A Sad Tale, and Perhaps a Lesson: Ray Harryhausen’s Retirement @DenofGeekUS #DenOfGeek #MythologyMonday #MythologyMonandæg

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This is a link to a sad story for me, care of Den of Geek. It celebrates the birthday of the special effects pioneer, Ray Harryhausen. As I’ve written, I love Clash of the Titans. It was a huge part of my childhood. It’s a shame that it represents the end of an era. TL;DR: A brutal review of Clash of the Titans by a dense, visionless critic (not my favorite group of people) writing for Variety drowned out the positive reviews and disheartened Harryhausen. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, causing him to retire from filmmaking. While his techniques had largely (not completely!) become antiquated at that point, my guess is that he would have adapted if he had stayed. We’ll never know. Even if that’s not the case, the article points out that he was more than just a special effects guy.

For the average person, social media isn’t as focused as a movie review. That is, as a non-celebrity, I don’t wake up every morning expecting an attack on my character, but the volume of commentary is so large that you’d be a fool not to think it’ll come your way eventually. Don’t let it bum you out, especially when it comes from people that don’t know you that are saying things that aren’t true.

Ray left for Olympus in 2013. Rest in peace, good sir.

Wouldn’t it be cool if he were buried on Mt. Olympus?

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How TTRPGs Took Hestia’s Place in Our Culture @stephenfry #MythologyMonday #MythologyMonandæg #RPG

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I love the Graham Norton Show. I’m not sure why — I’m not a fan of talk shows — but I’ll leave that mystery to the philosophers. I’m any case, Facebook keeps throwing the show’s videos at me. This one from 2018 had an interesting message.

Skip to 1:22 to get to my point. Skip to 1:55 to see how confused Nicole Kidman is.

TL;DR: At the time of filming, Stephen Fry had released a book called, Heroes. In discussing it, he mentioned his favorite Greek god, Hestia.

And the hearth, when you think about it is all of our ancestors, whatever our ethnicity . . . all our ancestors gathered around flames at night to stay warm and protect themselves from animals, and they told stories about things over which they had no control. . . . Everything you can’t understand and control you give a name – a god – and so these gods developed personalities around the fire. And now I think we can safely say we’ve lost the hearth. You know, we don’t eat around tables anymore, someone’s got a PlayStation in that room, and they get a delivery of pizza into it, and someone else has got another . . .  they’re streaming things in another room. No one gathers around and shares stories anymore. We’ve lost our focus; we’ve lost our hearth.

Fry’s point is correct though incomplete; he failed to mention that these stories eventually became a form of entertainment because it wasn’t relevant to his point. In any event, we’ve lost the art of shared storytelling. Movies, TV shows, and novels are one-sided storytelling. The hearth gives us all the opportunity to take our turn telling our stories, or directly contribute to the stories of others through questions or commentary. Perhaps the fact that a novel inspires a reader to write their own novel provides some give-and-take, but that’s hardly an intimate experience, and it’s reserved for those with the drive, resources, skill set, and perhaps luck to publish a novel.

But then there’s we, the TTRPG nerds. We haven’t lost this at all, have we? What is a table-top, role-playing game session at someone’s dining room table if not “the hearth”? Unless you have a totalitarian DM that insists it’s “their game,” everyone at the table is telling the story.

We’re one of the last cultural bastions of intimate community activity. Kind of ironic that the social misfits are what’s keeping this part of our social identity alive, huh? Make sure you don’t blow that opportunity or shirk that responsibility. Personally, I think it’s tautological to say that doing so requires we focus more on the characters and story than on the mechanics, but whatever keeps *you* at the table is good enough. Food for thought.

Fry’s book, Heroes, will have to go on my reading list.

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My Appreciation for Hephaestus #MythologyMonday #MythologyMonandæg

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Hephaestus got a bum deal. He was born ugly (not his fault), and for that he was cast out from Olympus by his mother, Hera. This disabled him. Or maybe the next casting out did. A lot of this depends on whom you ask.

This looks familiar.

Somehow, he made it back to Olympus, but despite always coming through for the gods via his skills as a blacksmith, this treatment continued. He was cast out again, this time by Zeus (who may have been his dad) after a family spat. He made it back a second time because some drunk hedonist named Dionysus snuck him in. Even Dionysus screwed him over, though, foiling his plans to teach Hera a lesson. As the archetype of the “middle child,” I can relate to all of this. I was always treated like crap despite being the only reliable member of the family. But hey, it was my fault for continuing to keep them in my life for the first forty years or so. Hephaestus should have cut ties as well.

However, Hephaestus ultimately had it better than I. He was put in an arranged marriage with Aphrodite in order to avoid a war among the other gods for her hand in marriage. I’m sure he liked this arrangement. Aphrodite has not returned my requests for comments on the matter, but her infidelity speaks volumes. In the end, she wasn’t much of an olive branch.

Yes, I used a hashtag including a Norse word in it. Norse gods >> Greek gods.

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Mythology Problems #MythologyMonday

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This is an oldie but goodie.

Here’s an example of #1

Here’s an example of #2

Here’s an example of #3

Here’s an example of #4

Spelling counts.

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Ravens Are Cool #MythologyMonday

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Here’s a nice one I found on social media (original author unknown).

Comma splices, on the other hand, trigger me.

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Good Watch: Ragnarok, Season 2 @jonasgravli @SunthDanu @netflix #MythologyMonday #Ragnarok #Jotunn #Thor #Loki #GoodWatch #tv

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Last week, I watched season 2 of Ragnarok. I previously discussed season 1, which I think I liked more than I should have. I’m a sucker for mythology, so I sometimes give modern dramatizations a little more credit than they deserve (though this is not absolute). This certainly applies here. The acting was rather sour at times, and I’m not sure whether that’s because the English is dubbed. However, I haven’t seen a better representation of mythology on film than this show, and that’s despite the fact that it intentionally (and appropriately) takes the “gods” and “giants” in a different direction.

The premise is that the war between gods and giants never ends. Both groups are continuously reincarnated but in different ways. You learn in season 2 that the giants know who they are their entire lives, even as they take on new ones through reincarnation. However, because the gods represent the interests of humans, they possess or are reincarnated as (probably the former, but unclear) humans, taking time to remember/learn who they are. This creates a foot race. The giants are busy destroying the world (in the most modern of ways in this show), searching for evidence that the gods are returning. Once they learn that the gods are back, they race to complete their plans, or even kill the gods, before the gods gain their full strength. The complication for the giants are that they’re bound by the rules of the game, which doesn’t allow them to act directly at times.

See? Giants aren’t all that bad.

Despite getting to the action this season, there’s still character development in play. For example, there’s an obscure character in Norse mythology, Járnsaxa (don’t click the link if you don’t want to be able to infer spoilers), whose role took me by surprise. Her character was in front of my face for two seasons, and I didn’t recognize her until the last episode of season 2. Based on the myths, her presence is important to how the series should wrap up. Some new characters were “born” in this season as well, including two extremely important ones, Loki and … something else.

The actor playing Loki is no Tom Hiddleston — who is? — but he does a good job, and the writing for his character is as good as any I’ve seen for any god from any mythology ever on television or in the movie theater. He’s exactly what Loki is supposed to be, which is hard to fit into modern storytelling. He’s not evil. He’s not even always selfish. He’s . . . Loki. Moreover, Thor’s reluctance to remove Loki as a threat makes a ton of sense, just as it does in Norse mythology, but not in exactly the same way, because this show takes place today.

Season 1 was very slow — all set up — but season 2 really got us into the mythology. Unfortunately, it’s only six, 50-minute (or so) episodes. I wanted a lot more.

I can’t guarantee you’ll like it if you’re not a mythology nut like me, so as always, YMMV.

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