: 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

@Lee1909368

One thing you seem to be forgetting regarding myths, is they are extremely prevalent stories. I prefer to avoid the word "good" because, honestly, some of them are rather crap as stories, but they are definitely memorable.

Proof? They survived.

Think about Shakespeare. He certainly wasn't the only writer of 16th century. More likely there were thousands of writers contemporary to him. Still, how many of them can you mention off top of your head? How many are still played on scenes all around the world, or published with new reprints every year? Shakespeare was extremely memorable and prevalent, and so motives of his sceneplays are included all over the popculture - for the simple reason, they are memorable.

Now Shakespeare's sceneplays are - what - 400 years old? Compare that with myths from ancient Greece. Norse gods are at least 2000 years old. Hercules/Heracles is roughly 3000 years old and still fresh. Egyptian gods survived good 5000 years. It pretty much means they appealed to the audience all that time. Now this is some good marketing sample of a successful franchise!

Essentially, by choosing mythology you choose "tested and true", something that continuously kept being successful long before your medium was born. People kept retelling the myths for centuries and they always found willing audience. You'd need to screw up really bad to retell it and not be successful.

I'll refrain from stating my opinions on influence of including mythology on actual quality of the final work. I can just state it's a safe marketing move.

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: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

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: The best place I can suggest to turn to with this kind of open questions - on military and weapons - is 4chan/k/. It's an imageboard gathering fans of all things connected with weapons of

: 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

More posts by @Lee1909368

: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

: Should a long flashback be written in first or third person? In my novel there will be a chapter-length flashback as one character relates a story from his past. The rest of the novel is

: How to have a character be nameless for the first few paragraphs of a book? Let me first explain what is going in in the beginning of the story: My main character belongs to a tribal culture

: The best place I can suggest to turn to with this kind of open questions - on military and weapons - is 4chan/k/. It's an imageboard gathering fans of all things connected with weapons of

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