https://twitter.com/AlishaGrauso/status/1337263317727866880?s=19
No culture but the culture pushed on you by gigantic companies trying to sell you merch. Superman v Batman is exactly the same as traditions that have been evolving naturally for thousands of years. Buying a Spiderman backpack is equivalent to knocking on wood or leaving a shot of vodka out in the woods for the leshiy. In Ant Man's name, amen.
Eastern European folk tales are like... There was a fool. His parents told him to help around the house. He ignored them and lazed around. One day he was nice to a talking animal and it gave him magical powers so he killed the Tsar, married his daughter, and became the new Tsar. The end.
Marvel is like... There was a John Galt who was awesome and did sex (but also had feelings). Muslims tried to kill him and failed. Politicians tried to take his stuff and failed. He made friends with other cool dudes in the CIA and the military and the secret international special forces. Then they killed bad guys. But there were more bad guys - even worse than before. So they killed the bad guys. But there were even more bad guys even worserer... And so on again and again. (Some of the individual stories are better, some are worse, but once they all fuse into the same story it's just a pointless mess without end.)
Also no one owns folklore. It's from the people, for the people.
Kazakhstan folk tales are like: Once there was a peasant. He happened to catch a fairy, who gave him three wishes. Because he was a bumfuck stinking hick unable to imagine anything outside of his village, the most awesome thing he could think to wish for was to torment the local Jew, by among other things, making him dance on a thicket of thorns until the Jew gave him all his gold to stop. The wicked Jew then went to a judge to complain, but the judge said he was obviously lying because no Jew would ever give up his gold. He then had the Jew executed for his lies, and he was cast into the lake of fire for all eternity.
Just kidding, that's actually a German folk tale.
I was about to say the Kazakhs stole it from the Grimm brothers - I also read it as one of those Grimm stories they never told you about as a kid. Would be curious to hear about actual Kazakh tales.
On the subject of Jew-hating folklore, lest the Germans get too singled out... I'm told some of the 1001 (Arabian) Night stories end with a Jewish girl converting to Islam and cutting off her father's head as a show of rejecting her religion.
There's also a Russian folk tale about a (Christian) soldier walking home asking to sleep over with a Jewish couple, sharing their bed and trying to fuck the wife under the sheet, until she realizes the cock is uncircumcised and screams, and he blames his cock for acting on its own and pleads ignorance. (Though there's a version of the story where no Judaism is mentioned - it's just nondenominationally rapey.)
I threw in Kazakhstan since it's indistinguishable from a story Borat would tell. The closest thing I know to a Kazakh folk tale is that according to legend, the first Turk was born to and raised by a wolf. This is why wolves are a Turkic nationalist symbol.
The Turks obviously stole that one from the Romans ;-)
The two best Russian fairytales:
Emelya who's so lazy he asks a wish-granting fish to animate his oven so he never has to walk and can just ride around on an oven instead
Danko who answers his own question "What would I do for the people?!" by ripping his flaming heart out of his chest and using it as a lantern to guide them. Maxim Gorky knew how to write communist fairytales. 😃
Extremely relatable tbh
Me as a child: Emelya the Fool is right, he can ask for anything and he asks for that!
Me as an adult: Emelya the wise man, Emelya the prophet, this is fully automated luxury gay space communism
Greek fairy tales be like: there was some boy and he wanted to marry the hot chick from his village but his parents wanted him to marry some rich girl from another village who was ugly as fuck, and he couldn't make up his mind so he died single lol get rekt
Also apparently there are goblins trying to cut down the tree that holds earth for some reason, but then Christmas comes and then they can come back on the surface of the earth and mess with people so they just forget about the tree every time so it regrows before they come back, and they just never figure it out. Or maybe they have figured it out and are doing it on purpose because they reached some kind of existentialist conclusion that if they did manage what they were trying to do then they'd be left without a purpose. The kallikantzaroi lore is pretty funny.
One must imagine the goblins happy.
I once read a Russian folk tale that was sort of like Cinderella (orphan with an evil stepmother who makes the poor girl do all the work so her biological daughter can be pampered.)
It ended with the spirit of winter killing both the stepmother and her daughter in a massive blizzard as punishment for them being too greedy and mistreating the other daughter. Much better ending imo those русские know what they're doing. I think the Soviets even made it into a movie with their own state owned, communist version of disney, where there are no princesses :lenin-pogger:
Is that Morozko, very popular movie in what used to be the second world.
I think it was "The Twelve Months" it was an animated Soyuzmultifilm
Indonesian mythology be like horny man tries to get the girl but the girl uses magic to cockblock the man so in his moment of horny rage he created a natural wonder/temple.
Or his horniness makes him disobeys his parent and left to marry a girl so he got punished by magic for his insolence.
chinese folk tales be like noahs ark but replace the boat and animals with massive civil engineering projects