Are mythologies from fictional sources on topic?
Questions about the Old Gods of the Forest from Game of Thrones?
Questions about the Nine Divines from the Elder Scrolls series of video games?
Etc.
I'm thinking no, but I thought the question ought to be asked. We could ban these questions ent...
the first one with that tag was quite well received, though.
then again, the post suggesting that we have fictional mythologies be on topic was quite heavily downvoted.
@HDE226868 I just vtced them both.
Man, learning details about arthurian mythos has always been quite high on my bucket list. I'm glad this Stack exists now as it gives me an excuse to do so.
Thomas Archibald Barron (born March 26, 1952) is an American writer of fantasy literature, books for children and young adults, and nature books.
== Biography ==
Barron was born in Boston. He spent early childhood in a town full of New England history and apple orchards, Harvard, Massachusetts. His family moved to Colorado and he spent much of his youth on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains. Barron's writing reflects his great passion for nature and the spiritual values of the natural world, as well as his belief in the power of every person. He studied history at Princeton University, where he is...
@durron597: I honestly don't see why you would retract your close vote for this question and not my question. Both of them use Age of Mythology as an inspiration for the question that actually asks about classical Greek mythology.
We'll be entering public beta soon, so we need to get word out to the rest of Stack Exchange about Mythology Stack Exchange. One of the best ways of doing this is with Community Promotion Ads.
Here is part of the canonical spiel given on meta posts on graduated sites where we submit our ads for ...
@durron597 I don't think that's really a sufficiently strong reason. From Area51 stats:
> 2.5 answers per question is good, only 1 answer per question needs some work. On a healthy site, questions receive multiple answers and the best answer is voted to the top.
@durron597 Okay, looked at the Meta.SE post. 1) the fact that you, me, and Ixrec all have difficulty thinking of an example (and no one else has even commented even a hint of one) strongly suggests that you could not post a new answer indefinitely. The "canon" of Greek mythology is limited, and I strongly suspect there are few possible answers to my question. (cont)
(cont) Also, 2), the only question archetype that my question fits in any sense is the one where every answer is equally valid. I contest that every possible answer to my question would be equally valid. Some will be better examples than others, and I'd pick the one that is most similar to the game example.
Athena was squarely on the Greek's side for most of the war
They only began to pray to Athena in the final year of the war
I agree the example is not quite on point, but what I'm really trying to say is that with one good example and one okay but not great example the question doesn't seem any more answered than it did when we started
I mean, ultimately, I'm only one user. If I were moderator I wouldn't close the question.
Being able to act unilaterally requires a much higher degree of confidence in the decision; it's sat on two CVs for hours, and it probably won't get closed and my vote will age away. I'm cool with that.
Pausanias in its Description of Greece mentions during his visit to Corinth an image of Zeus Chthonios in a temple:
The images of Zeus also are in the open; one had not a surname, another they call Chthonius (of the Lower World) and the third Most High.
This has been confirmed by archeologi...
Did we ever establish where we stand on Q's that ask about pop culture versions of mythologies? I.e. I know we had a question about Marvel Thor versus mytho-Thor.
@Piper On History.SE, we have some excellent questions that were inspired by movies (asking if a certain story in a movie is accurate, etc). I don't see why we can't have the same here.
I've seen a lot of Cthulhu questions on the Sci Fi stack exchange, would he be considered on topic here?
He would be considered a mythological creature wouldn't he, the same as The Minotaur or Medusa?
I think we should be ignoring tags for the time being. We simply don't have enough data yet to decide on what tags are useful and what are not.
The whole point of tags is to help people discover content. If marvel does that, without somehow harming the site, I'm ok with it. And at this point I simply don't have enough data to say whether the tag is harmful or not.
My guess is if the tag gets popular it will most probably confuse people in thinking that any and all questions about the marvel universe are on topic. That wouldn't be good.
But it has to get popular first. If it's on a couple of questions, who cares...
At this point our focus should be on generating content, not categorizing content. I find it quite puzzling that we have as many tags Meta questions as we have scope ones.
@YannisRizos I clearly do. I understand why we'd want to wait until later, but better start out good than just let something we know how to do go bad and then at some point have to do a whole cleanup if we can just do it good from the start.
Also: that sentence has issues, but I can't wrap my head around how to make it better right now.
@YannisRizos Except that it already has a discussion going on at the meta, and I'm sort of waiting for that to reach a slightly more definitive stance.
@YannisRizos That cthulhu one a bit higher up could use a scope tag, but I can't edit on meta.
Yeah. I'm not sure if I want fantasy genres included in myth.se or not, but the whole "there's no difference" angle strikes me as a rather lousy argument.
@Semaphore Not me. I just find the wording "fictional" mythology kinda stupid. I agree that we don't need the stuff it is used for (that's clearly for SciFi & Fantasy)
Sure. We can talk about anything we want in here, really. The main focus should be mythology, and the site, but it's chat, it's not supposed to be restrictive.
I was browsing Wikipedia and came upon three different variations for Ra's origins:
In the former version, a mound arises from the waters. An egg was laid upon this mound by a celestial bird. The egg contained Ra. In some variants, the egg is laid by a cosmic goose. However, the egg was a...
Well, it might turn out that there isn't a clear winner, and different cults believed different variations at different times. In that case, your version might be an answer for its time period.
A different approach would be: Pharaoh Foo established Ra as the main figure of the Egyptian pantheon, and during his reign this variation was the accepted one.
I often hear of a story of Loki taking Mjölnir away from Thor and selling it to giants. Thor then gets angry and makes Loki join him in wearing wedding dresses to enter the giants place unnoticed to get it back.
What is the actual story behind this and who were these giants and were they actuall...
I would have voted to close that question as "unclear". Because I have absolutely no idea what "«Articuno» in Pokémon" is. And I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to know what it is on a site that isn't about pokemon.
@YannisRizos Sure, if you want to put it that way...
That's a phoenix.
An artist's conception, that is.
The latter is definitely known in mythology. The former? Is there such a bird in any mythology? (Pokémon not counted because it was not intended to be mythology.)
@Semaphore: Actually...I think creative intent could work for that. We might have issues with, say, Atlantis, but I think that would work quite well for distinguishing "fictional" mythologies that go on SciFi.SE. +1'd your comment. You should make that into an answer. — El'endia Starman17 hours ago
I think this is the point Chad was trying to make on Meta. We need a hard limit, otherwise there will always be someone confused and/or angry we closed their question.
I do no know how we would distinguish between "REAL" mythology and fictional unless we put a hard date for the cutoff like pre 1900. — Chad20 hours ago
Greek mythology is fiction, but it isn't fictional - it represents actual stories told by actual people about their actual beliefs at an actual time and place in history.
There has been a lot of controversy in Meta and chat about what is and what is not on topic as far as fictional sources, religions, and whatnot.
Should we allow tags for external media?
Are fictional mythologies on topic?
Is Cthulhu on or off topic?
Is scientology on topic here?
Are discussion ...
There has been a lot of controversy in Meta and chat about what is and what is not on topic as far as fictional sources, religions, and whatnot.
Should we allow tags for external media?
Are fictional mythologies on topic?
Is Cthulhu on or off topic?
Is scientology on topic here?
Are discussion ...
Also, here is one potential issue with setting an age cutoff:
> Atlantis was a fictional island made up by Plato. It serves as the fictional antagonist to Plato's ideal state in "Timaeus" and (especially) "Critias". They are written in the dialectic style, in which the character Critias narrates the story of Atlantis. (source)
@durron597 Yea, but it's clearer to vote for an answer, that way I can still upvote the question (because it's a good one), but I don't agree with the answer you propsed in the question, so I couldn't upvote it.
Some cultures simply didn't get around to organising their mythology in the written word until quite recently. Wars, illiteracy, invading Romans, invading Spanish, invading British, etc....
No, it shouldn't. Age isn't a very good criteria, it sure has something to say, but shouldn't be the be all end all.
For a (purely hypothetical) example: Assume that some Amazonian tribe has a creation myth, but according to it, the world is ~500 years old (so the myth is about ~1500 or somethin...
@durron597 Why? Because he wrote books in old greece? If those books happen to be about things from the greece myths, or things that turned into greek myths.
@durron597 Because historians of the era tell us it's a myth.
Also, not entirely sure what you mean by "sophocles should be on topic". All his surviving plays are based on myths. Questions about the myths themselves would certainly be on topic.
As I understand it, it was common practice for a playwright to retell a well-known story with the details changed to suit the playwright's needs. A tidy way to avoid a lot of tedious exposition.
In Antigone, this leads to some significantly different endings:
In Sophocles play, she is impris...
@durron597 Perhaps we could do the same and tweak the idea of creative intent. If there is a single creator (or small group), then we can look at whether they believe their own ideas (and/or the/their source material). I think this should sufficiently exclude Cthulhu but keep Greek plays.
This will also be biased towards older material, so it fits more with your age-related criteria.
> Mormons believe that the people of the Book of Mormon lived in the western hemisphere, that Christ appeared in the western hemisphere after his death and resurrection, that the true faith was restored in Upstate New York by Joseph Smith, that the Garden of Eden was located in North America, and that the New Jerusalem would be built in Missouri.
Orthodox Christianity generally says that the Garden of Eden was located around Israel and that the New Jerusalem will also be in the area of Jerusalem.
If orthodox Christian mythology is on-topic, then Mormon mythology should be as well, despite its age.
Especially because Joseph Smith and his followers really believed what they said.
For what it's worth, it took Christianity.SE a while to ultimately decide that Scientology was off-topic because it doesn't self-identify as Christian.
Well, regarding Joseph Smith, the section regarding his death and the previous section on Wikipedia imply that he died at least in part because of his Mormon beliefs. This is a fairly strong indicator to me that the founder of Mormonism actually believed in it.
Norse and Greek mythology, especially, are depicted with some frequency in movies, books, comics, and television. It's reasonable to wonder how closely their representation in pop culture media represents their traditional mythology.
So far, it seems like these can be on-topic, good questions, ...
@durron597: Hmm. I just had another thought. I think another criteria we can use is whether the myth explains something. The Cthulhu mythos doesn't try to explain anything, so far as I know. It's a collection of stories about supernatural beings, which would probably more properly place it in cryptozoology, which has already been decided as off-topic.
And furthermore, a mythology shouldn't just explain one thing, but a broad set of things, so to speak. Incredibly vague, I know, but I think you'll get the idea.
Ultimately, after much discussion in chat,, it seems clear to me that we are never going to come up with an exacting metric; it's going to have to be up to the community to organically decide what is and what isn't on topic. However, we still need to have some sort of guidance, and the best thing...
@durron597 I put your quote in google and the top result was some bs blog... I didn't really thought that was what you were quoting, but thought I'd ask just in case.
Zeus is a complex character; although he is chief among gods, with many noble qualities, he is also deeply flawed. Among various sites on the internet 1 2 3 4, there's this passage which suggests that he is a compilation of various supreme gods:
Zeus was mighty, glorious, awesome and wise, a...
> If the myth/legend predates modernity in it's original society, it's likely to be on topic; modernity is defined to be prior to the Industrial Revolution in that particular society.
Heh, this is going to generate tons of Meta drama once we go public ;)
According to Mormon Doctrine, Adam and Eve lived in Adam-ondi-Ahman. Which was revealed to Joseph Smith to be located in Missouri (see D&C 116:1).
This would mean that unless Adam's posterity went on some epic intercontinental journey between Adam and Noah's time, that Noah likely built the ark...
Generally, it is agreed that Christian mythology is on-topic. Now, recently, there has been a great deal of discussion in chat about how to distinguish "genuine" mythologies (e.g. Greek, Norse, Native American, etc.) from "fictional" mythologies (e.g. Star Wars, Game of Thrones, etc.). Various cr...
The reason for the discrepancy is that Egyptian mythology was not unified even four thousand years ago. There were four major cities, each with their own stories.
The egg creation myth is that of the city of Hermopolis, that you've already cited above. Ogdoad is the name of the 8 divine entitie...
Man, writing a good answer for this site takes a lot more work than a good StackOverflow answer.
Especially since I have limited time, so I am limiting myself to good questions with zero answers in most cases, which means they're really hard questions, which means they take more work.
@El'endiaStarman do you think questions about arthurian Merlin are on topic?
> Geoffrey combined existing stories of Myrddin Wyllt (Merlinus Caledonensis), a North Brythonic prophet and madman with no connection to King Arthur, with tales of the Romano-British war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus to form the composite figure he called Merlin Ambrosius (Welsh: Myrddin Emrys). He is allegedly buried in the Broceliande forest, near Paimpont in Brittany.
It's known that Merlin was not a real person, and no one believed that he was.
The first one casts a wide net. @durron597 already challenged it on Meta. The second one was mostly an experiment to see how the community will react to folklore questions.
@durron597 Yes. The problem isn't so much with the questions we currently have, but with the questions those might inspire. The "Hidden features of C++" q on SO is excellent. However, it inspired a million and one "Hidden features of foo" questions that sucked. Hard.
If allowing Cthulhu opens the doors to a ton of e-meters questions, then, sorry, Cthulhu is out.
@YannisRizos Yet still another perspective is one you suggested at earlier: let as much in as possible to drive traffic, then start limiting things when there is a problem.
@durron597 This was our biggest failure on ProgSE, trying to cherry pick some career questions. There was a point when career advice was off topic, but career development was on topic. The result: A f'ing mess.