Me? I like those obscure Scandinavian ones that are like... a gnome that steals your extra raisins or whatever

Also mothman is pretty cool but he's totally real so he doesn't count 😤

    • Poogona [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      True, but the best part for me was that the rainbow snake isn't necessarily good or bad, just a snake doing its thing. It's like it's "naturally supernatural," larger than life but operating within the scope of the natural world as the people who told the story understood it.

      • SoyViking [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I think that Abrahamic mythology is extremely polarised between good and evil. You rarely find absolute good and absolute evil in other mythologies. The Norse gods were revered and worshipped but they would absolutely do stupid or malicious stuff from time to time and fight among themselves, meanwhile the Jotuns were rivals of the gods and could be dangerous to encounter but the gods could intersct with them and they were dangerous in a "ancient force of nature you shouldn't fuck with" way rather than the Abrahamic "wants to torment you forever" kind of way.

        • Poogona [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Norse mythology is an interesting example too because what we have today is supposedly only a small, dubiously-translated piece of the whole. And from what we do have, I swear it has to be ironic or something. The Norse gods are portrayed at every turn as childish and downright villainous, doing all kinds of petty evil like worming their way out of paying for contract labor to systematic oppression and mistreatment of "ugly" dwarves and jotuns. Considering the patriarchal, deeply unequal society that characterized a lot of the region at the time when they were meeting lots of Christians, it makes me wonder if all the tragedy and irony and hopelessness of the famous Voluspa is the result. Maybe an older, now lost, version of the tale is less doom and gloom?