♛ Lady Sekhmetnakt ♛

Thank you so much for engaging.

To reiterate what you have said, I find it so strange that ‘diversity’ has become a euphemism… particularly in the realm of fiction. The strangeness mostly owing to, it’s otherwise synonymous, axiomatic, term — representation.

Any good fictional work, or even non-fiction/creative nonfiction, is only of use if it represents truth. The complication obviously arises that fictional works are ‘creative lies’, but I think the reality nonetheless is that the best ‘creative lies’ actually have important things to say, and demonstrate.

Alexander E Jones, thank you for engaging also.

I can appreciate it is a matter of context, but then it would be worthwhile to follow through with a concrete contextual analysis.

  1. Dragons myths exist in various cultures, and in various forms also, with slight to extreme variation. For the sake of quick example, Japanese dragons have no wings. So in incorporating, both European myth and history, Martin can’t be said to contradict himself for including dragons — no less with wings — because that is consistent with european myth. So your (false) equivalency between him including creatures(no matter how mythical) consistent with European history — but not a people that are inconsistent with both the myth and history of the time(with the two, necessarily, bleeding into each other).
  2. Like I said in the first point, saying ‘it wasn’t really based on Europe…It was based on European fantasy’ is really just pretty hollow.Do you not see the crossover? They are practically the exact same thing. Myth didn’t come out of history, History came out of myth. If you really want to unpack the context of this, just refer to myth as a global phenomena of all cultures, which leads me to my third point.
  3. If you look keenly at myth stories, not just for fictional or creative flourish, what you will begin to see is that, universally, myth has acted as a unifier of each particular culture; in terms of ethics, pre-science etc. This is of particular attention given the nature that as a unifier, it was a rough and ready approximation of both what they did and didn’t know, and so you can call it ‘selfish’, but that’s just redundant. It was a necessary requirement for survival and progress, and by extension, your existence. Further still, lamenting the ‘western hero fantasy — about the person with a saviour complex’: grow up dude, that’s everywhere. Every culture has a hero myth — with a saviour complex to boot. And you know what else? It’s the reason that we are here today debating this very point. These myths not only have ethical functions, they are obviously very successful at what they were built for, because all of the cultures that are here today, had myths of that and the similar sort. And you know what? None of those people had internet. Whoops. And unfortunately, without even a dial-up modem, many of those folks, spanning generations, didn’t have the slightest of clues that there were others on earth, or at least outside certain perimeters. So it’s really facile to look at European myth — particularly as a myth that is isolated from other cultures, because all myths are *by necessity* isolated from the other cultures, not only to the extent that they hadn’t yet had exposure to the other cultures, but in later instances also.

Thank you for engaging,

For your curiosity, I could not more highly recommend you watch Jordan Peterson’s excellent lectures on myth[particularly with regard to dragons]. I have attached one below:

Best,

C

)

    Charles Harry Mackenzie

    Written by

    I’m just really curious about everything.

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