portraitoftheoddity:

portraitoftheoddity:

Can 2018 be the year idiots FINALLY realize that marvel=/=mythology and stop sending wicked obnoxious mythsplaining messages to fanblogs?

Here’s the thing; there isn’t even a really solid, concrete, holy and inarguable myth ‘canon.’

There’s a reason there’s vast inconsistency in the myths themselves – why Loki, for instance, is sometimes a benevolent trickster and sometimes a world-ending bringer of doom, or why some character might be named as one god’s kid one time and another deity’s offspring another. 

The myths that we actually have written down in the Prose Edda were recorded in the 13th century – but the tradition of germanic mythology that the ‘modern’ myths stem from goes back to the fucking Iron Age. There were Anglo-saxons running around early medieval England worshipping Woden and Thunor – aka Odin and Thor – 600 years before the Prose Edda was recorded. 

Most myths were passed down through oral tradition for a period of centuries, and as Germanic tribes interacted with other peoples, their mythologies mixed and evolved. The early “original” mythology that the Norse Mythology we know of today was born from would probably be unrecognizable to us. And of the myths and stories told during the middle ages, viking age, and migration period, only a tiny fraction were recorded and survived to us today. 

So when you get super pedantic about myth details, you’re referring to one or two surviving texts featuring stories that were already ancient when they were written down, and are only a fragment of the stories told, which would have evolved and varied tremendously. 

If anything, Marvel’s weird bastardization of myth and integration of it into a different folklore system is almost more authentic to the style of early traditions of Nordic/Germanic storytelling than slavish adherence to the Eddas is. And fanfiction is about as close to a modern mythic-folklore tradition as we can get. 

(Now get the fuck out of my yard.)  

@fuckyeahrichardiii