: Re: What's the significance of ancient mythology in literature? Whenever I see a movie critic praise Ridley Scott's Prometheus, they seem to be drooling over all the mythological references, although

@Carla500

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Myths and religions are "stories we already know." Adding references to known mythology in a contemporary story both grounds it to reality and connects it to our larger culture.

Think about modern myths. If you have an ensemble action piece in a movie or a TV episode, for example, there's often a moment just before the climactic battle where five or six heroes walk towards the camera grimly, in slow motion. That's been picked up from a hundred Westerns, which in turn was probably taken from Seven Samurai. Does that make the SloMo Charge of the Light Brigade any less moving? As a watcher, doesn't your heart swell to see the heroes march towards their potential doom?

It's the same thing with referencing ancient mythology. These are tropes. They're well-honed narrative devices. The stories have been told before and told well, and by calling back to them or repeating them, we are trying to borrow some of the emotional impact the original had and echo it in our own work. And if the fictional characters in your story reference myths from an actual culture, it makes them more realistic (in the sense that the story is happening in "the real world" or "our timeline").

Additionally, when do you something as blunt as call your movie Prometheus, you are by definition inviting your audience to make the comparison between your story and the myth. If the movie had been called Ripley Believes It or Not or Float Like a Butterfly or ...On Little Cat Feet, you'd be invited to compare it to something else.

ETA Writer L.B. Gale just posted a discussion of this on her blog this morning.

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