The Nightstar Zoo

i realize that SoI is based on greek/roman mythology, but what is everyones favorite mythology? there are a lot of different kinds, and greek/roman is the most common, but there are a lot of others.

personally i like egyptian and greek/roman, and would like to learn a bit more about norse. what about all you?

p.s. i would make a poll for this, but i would leave something off, and even if i didnt, you couldnt put multiple on a poll.

p.p.s. this is also an attempt to get more people in here now that were getting close to the return date.

I am a BIG fan of Greek/Roman mythology. That basically started years and years ago, probably when I watched the Hercules TV series. Out of curiosity, I checked out the gods and found them fascinating, which inevitably led on to a love of Classical history in general. This is part of the reason why, when I write long stories (I intend to be a writer), there are generally Classical themes.
I'm also a fan of Norse mythology for, I feel, fairly obvious reasons. While I was named after the explorer Freya Stark, I still have a soft spot for the goddess and her family. I also deeply enjoy Celtic (and other cultures) stories of the fae folk, which probably began with the play A Midsummer Nights Dream. I recently got to play Puck in a pseudo-production, which was great fun for me both as an amateur actress and as a mythology lover.
While it's not quite under the umbrella, Christianity and the various myths it has encompassed in it I find fascinating. In particular, I love the Divine Comedy by Dante (Dorothy L. Sayers is my favorite translator, as she puts it into stanza, which loses some of its accuracy, but makes me feel as if it is the way Dante Alighieri would have wanted it to be) and the Choirs of Angels, as well as the various Angels themselves. This was partly inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Queens Fool by Philippa Gregory, but also because they're just damn interesting.

Greek and Roman remain my favorite, however. This is, of course, partly because I deeply enjoy condensing the various myths down into less than a hundred words (my telling of Hermes' liason with Aphrodite tends to make even non-Classical students cackle) but mostly because they have had a huge, and sometimes negative, influence on our society.

Greco-Roman will always be my favourite, mostly because it's so much fun to look at all the contemporary work and break it down into the ideas that came from Greek myth. The themes have changed a whole bunch, we're more of a "you have the power in your life" people, whereas most of the greek literature was written as "the gods(or sometimes fate) own you, here's what's gonna happen if you screw up, or piss them off, or are born to the wrong people"

The Norse myths are pretty interesting as well. For me, I like the idea of non-immortal gods. The Norse weren't immortal like Apollo and the Greeks, they were just kinda hard to kill. Also, they knew exactly how they'd end, in Ragnarok, and most of there time was spent fighting it off, collecting the best human warriors to fight with them, trying to imprison those that would cause it, etc. I just like the idea of a god, ruler of the universe type like Odin who not only knows that he's going to die, but knows exactly how(Fenrir), and yet can't prevent it

The Egyptian myths are just a good break from the others, they're different from Classical myth, but have enough in common to be understandable to someone who's studied the classics pretty intensly.

I'm most familiar with Greek mythology, with Roman a close second...but my favorite would be the Celtic/Gaelic myths, especially the Irish. Asian myths also interested me quite a bit, if I remember that mythology class from a few years ago correctly...I kept my textbook because it has all these fascinatiing myths from around the world, but I haven't looked at it since that semester.

yet another question...the horror. Does anyone else see Superman as a Hercules with a bit MORE power added in? (flying, heat vision, ice breath, x-ray vision, and super speed are a lot to add in, but once you take those "touch ups" off of him, hes really just Hercules in a modern day.)

He originally just had super strength (which, as a side effect, let him jump really high), super speed and super toughness, and was thus even more like Heacles. The flying, heat vision, X-Ray vision, etc. didn't come around until later.

i think the flying was a natural step from the super jump. once he can get way up there, and jump for long distances way up there, its only natural to say "hey, he's almost flying...why dont we make him fly!"

I think it was during Crisis on Infinte Earths that the Earth-2 Superman got zapped and his powers got throttled back to his early days.

He had to *jump* back to the Fortress of Solitude to get himself fixed.

I still think Superman would have been way more interesting if he'd had a weakness other than kryptonite.

He's also vulnerable to magic, and red sun radiation causes him to lose his powers.

Actually, they keep trying to come up with other ways to deal with him, and it kinda backfires.

The scenario goes like this:
Superman is unbeatable under conditions 1,2,3,[...],N, so we've got to come up with a new thing to challenge him.
Challenge N+1: Supes is unable to win for a while.
Supes' power/skill/ingenuity increases.
Precident for Supes beating Scenario N+1
Supes can now win in scenario 1,2,3,[...],N,N+1.
Repeat ad nauseam

In this fashion did superman go from "able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" to flight and "faster than a speeding bullet" to faster than Flash: by tiny incirments.

*blinks* Londubh broke my head. And now I feel like Isle. (Just spent the past two days going through the archives. Good refresher.)

This is why Superman was seriously downgunned after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Supes had just gotten too grossly over-powered.

In the Good Old Days, Superman was strong enough to move the entire Earth.

Current Model: Not even. They took the edge off his magic weakness as a result.

Superman now shares the upper-echelon of power with other heroes rather than being in a class by himself.

Which is good, in my opinion.

Y'know, one of these days, I'd like to see a superhero who wasn't. Super, that is. I don't mean 'no superpowers' as in 'The Punisher' who just had a lot of guns or Batman, who was just awesome. I mean an average Joe who just has oodles of common sense and ends up saving random people with crazy powers, who then refer to him as 'Boss' or something.

I would find it so funny.

Go watch the TV show "Monk". its about a guy who solves crimes in a somewhat Holmes like manner, and from what you said, it sounds like you would like it.

You forgot the borderline OCD component to the guy...

borderline? Monk has full blown Obsesive Compulsive Disorder. or were you refering to Sherlock? I think Holmes may have been at least slightly Obsesive Compulsive, not enough to need to fix what he saw, but enough to notice that it was off. Take the first episode of Monk, you see him notice that the chair is at the wrong level for a short woman when nobody else did. Thats something Holmes would have seen. Yes, Monk is a lot different in that he has full blown OCD, is clostrophobic, germaphobic, and HAS to touch poles, but he is a lot like Holmes.

I love Monk, but that's not quite what I meant. Still, he does, indeed, rock.

Gah, sorry, that was me.

y'know, if you'd just get a propper registered handle that wouldn't happen so much...

oh, and incidentally, how Did you mean it? I'm not sure i quite follow, and i'm kinda missing somebody in my little story thingie...

The idea I had was that it was a world where there were superheroes. It was just that. for some as-yet unknown reason (i.e. I haven't bothered to come up with it yet) a bloke with no powers other than ridiculous oodles of common sense manages to somehow help the good guys and screw over the bad guys.
And having a registered handle would be too easy.

Like Max Lord?

Except that he got super powers eventually.

And then was replaced with a clone that, beyond surface appearances, was nothing like the original. The clone then proceeded to shoot Blue Beetle who, along with the rest of the superhero community, was under the influence of stupidity rays emitted by invisible sattelites put in place be the Legion of Doom!

Oh boy. That sure sounds like a Marvel plotline to me. (I still can't forgive them for Ben Reilly. Oh, sure, we got Kain, who rocked, and Ben was pretty cool, but for chrissakes, it was still an utter bitch keeping track of everything)

Except, i believe, that Blue Beetle is a DC character, which implies that this is a DC storyline.

I thought it might be, but as I've never been particularly interested in DC, I simply compared it to some of Marvel's more terrible plot lines.

It's this kind of stuff that put me off mainstream comics.

Everybody follows the artists around drooling.

Me, the writer makes all the difference.

There are darn few really good comics writers. the few that come easily to mind are: Kurt Busick (sometimes), George Perez (also a top artist), Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman.

It's not necessarily the actual writing that puts me off. Some of the comics have had great dialogue ('You realize that if we join with Onslaught we may never come back?' 'I realize the future of the world is at stake; don't confuse me with the details') but we still get some terrible ideas for plot lines (Clone Saga, anyone?) as well as terrible character concepts (I'm sorry, but I will never be able to take Thor seriously).

Yeah, yeah, door, ass, way out, get registered, yeah.

Oh gods, what did they do to Thor now?

Depending on context, the Onslaught line is...rather hackneyed, actually.

But, hey, when the fallout from Watchmen took hold on marvel and comics like X-men became unrelentingly moody and dark, I voted with my feet, dodging much nonsense.

Finally posting, in a vain hope that it will somehow help shorten the time until the end of the hiatus.

Anywho, responding to a bunch of stuff:

1> Norse myths are my personal favorite--being part Norwegian will do that to you. I've been to the family 'farm'--there's a hill, you go to the top of it, and they point out a standing stone, and then tell you, "That marks the arctic circle. Beyond that point, you can get 24 hours of sunlight and darkness for at least a couple days a year."

1.5> My second favorite isn't a proper 'myth' at all, in the sense of being a set of legends handed down over time--but it still fits many of the other criteria. I speak, of course, of the "Mythos" of H.P. Lovecraft.

1.75> After that, I'd go with the Egyptian. I just like their whole approach to the afterlife.

2> As has been noted, the chief problem in modern mainstream comics is that so many of them have had plots that are wholly dependent upon someone we're supposed to respect and empathize with [the hero], or someone we're supposed to fear [the villain] being a complete moron, at least for some stretch of time.

3> I've seen the "heroic ordinary guy" thing done from time to time in the comics. It usually takes one of two forms: Either a bit-character or even a major supporting character in an ongoing series is shown dramatically helping out the primary character [note that the implacable Alfred of Batman fame has gotten several stories that feature him], or the ordinary character is the main character's sidekick ["paging Rick Jones, paging Mr. Rick Jones"]. Entire series about 'ordinary' characters tend to devolve in one of two directions--either it's little more than a running gag, OR the character ends up getting super-powers after all, thereby ending the premise ["Still paging Mr. Rick Jones"].

And a new question brought to mind by the original one of this series:

Are any other 'living myths' part of the series? Ie, are the Norse, Egyptian, etc. gods running around as well? Or is it pure Greek?