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.
American culture is the first to be fully developed under capitalism rather than before. No wonder it is devoid of humanity.
The timeline definitely adds up, and it has to be the first celebrated example without a doubt--think De Tocqueville and so on. Does Weber make this argument in the Protestant Ethic?
On the other hand there are a lot of fuzzy definitions in play--are we talking culture in the Raymond Williams sense or in a nationalist sense? Can it be said that Euro-American culture existed before America? If not, wasn't there still continuity with Dutch and English and other European cultures, just like how there was continuity in French culture after the French Revolution? And also, industrial capitalism was only around 20 years or so at that point, so it's tough to argue America was founded under capitalism in a fully mature form.
Not trying to fact check for the sake of doing so, but because western history isn't my area and I'd be interested in learning more about this and other early capitalist societies!
White Australia as well, is literally just the bastard child of colonialism
Even after living in this goddamn country for 30 years I still couldn't tell you what american culture actually is outside of rampant consumerism and pervasive poverty that's been hyper normalized. This shit is a potemkin village with highways and traffic jams.
Anything good about American culture originated in black communities and then was appropriated and commodified
This is blatanly false, a bunch of it was stolen from native americans too.
You're forgetting how the Irish inspired America to drink like the Europeans they identify as, if only for a day
Like how did the state that industrialized the automobile end up with such shit roads
By dismantling the rail infrastructure, so all the freight has to go by truck.
pyramid scams, grind-culture, bootlicking and reality tv shows
hmmmmm i feel like there has to be some actual mythology from the early people who lived in north america, i wonder what happened to them?
They taught the pilgrims how to farm and then died on their way back to their home planet
this is the stuff your history teachers don't teach you in high school
Are we just pretending America doesn't have folk tales lol
John Henry's my favorite
https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/the-legend-of-john-henry-talcott-wv.htm
Edit: also thor is already a nordic folk tale lol
Idk how you could write that tweet and not at least see that part
Petition to replace Ant Man with Paul Bunyan in the next avengers movie
john henry is based and also the johnny cash song is awesome.
Sounds like urban legends would be a better example of modern mythology than superhero movies, then.
Folk lore serves many, many functions, and the idea that it serves merely as PSAs is a pretty reductive narrative that gets trotted out whenever you have to compare folk stories to literary genres, and its usually to show that the literary genres are better because they deal with more involved subjects or whatever. Folk tales deal with many subjects, from "Don't go into the woods at night alone" to polemics about specific virtues, to pretty deep existential questions.
This PSA brought to you by "Like two years of my primary school education was about fairy tales and I fucking hate H.C. Andersen", a subsidiary of my psyche.
I mean, I like superhero stuff, but for fuck's sake, I can't even remember half of Avengers: Endgame
The movies are flat and inoffensive pablum designed to appeal to as wide a market as possible
(unless you're like me and found Black Panther kind of offensive for being like "Yeah, but he's a good King who built a few youth centers, so much better than actually fixing the world with your advanced technology")
Or your neighbors, or continent. Some of that tech and medicine sure would help some post-colonial areas.
Learn to code kids
Eventually you will be hired to do drone strikes on HYDRA or AIM
or other poor black kids
Oh yeah I find the movies fun too. But I feel like I can enjoy them without thinking that knowing the lyrics to Spiderpig is the exact same as putting your beloved grandfather to rest by placing him in a boat and setting it on fire so he gets to Valhalla lmao
This is clearly the best response anyway
You just know someone is going to have a """Viking""" funeral where their body is dressed as Thor and the Pallbearers will be Captain America, Hulk, Hawkeye and Iron Man now
Literally impossible lol - Disney Bans Grieving Father From Having Spider-Man On Son's Grave
Hot damn, that's just unnecessarily evil
But I mean, it's Disney, so I don't know why I would be surprised
They can't show any leniency, to do otherwise would jeopardize their intellectual property. :capitalist:
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 two best Russian fairytales:
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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
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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. 😃
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
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
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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.
maybe they have figured it out and are doing it on purpose because they reached some kind of existentialist conclusion
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
This is complete utter bullshit.
Nordic and Eastern European mythology tells the people the story of whom they are. Robocop from 1987 tells Americans more about who they are and how they came to be, than any superhero shit.
robocop is a proto capeshit movie tho.
as are all folk/fairytales fables and mythologies.
the "difference" is that the spiderman folktale, about a kid in new york trying to stop crime in his neighborhood while struggling under capitalism to live his creative dream of being a photographer, is wholly co-opted by a megacorporation to sell product because they "own" it
but corporations do that with other folktales and fables as well, they just arnt able to copyright them so wholly. not that thousands of years of existance ever stops them from trying to declare ownership of something, but still
everyone giving the hot take a lashing sure is wilfully ignoring how much nordic shit is in the marvel movies. its poorly worded, but its close
tldr: comicbook characters themselves are not substantively different from folkheros. corporations seize the reigns of both whereever possible
This is one of the dumbest comments I have ever read on here.
robocop is a proto capeshit movie tho.
Have you even seen the movie? Robocop is clearly spoofing American society and the rising corporatism as well as authoritarianism through a police state. One of the central themes of that movie is how the police force is being replaced by a privatized mega corporation that is above the law. It's made a point that no one wants to bother investigating the OCP because they're doing such a better job than the local police department. In the 3rd act of the movie, the OCP even labels Robocop a criminal and orders the police department to kill him, under their orders. It's a pretty good fictional account of how corporations run our society and it was made during the Reagan era.
All through that movie, there are news commercials with smiling anchors who tell you that the world is going to shit and awful things are happening, then cut to a break with a commercial. We're now to a point where this is pretty accurate with our mainstream media. There's also that stupid sitcom that shows up over and over in the movie "I'll buy that for a dollar! Ha ha ha!", pretty good depiction of the dumbing down of society.
I'm not convinced you've ever seen Robocop. Or if you did, you clearly got the wrong idea of it.
everyone giving the hot take a lashing sure is wilfully ignoring how much nordic shit is in the marvel movies. its poorly worded, but its close
Corporations didn't even exist when mythology tales were written thousands of years ago. The biggest difference is that superheroes are beating up on criminals, and playing vigilante. A better comparison would be the tons of vigilante justice stories about cowboys set in the westerns that existed before superheroes. There was even a market for cowboy/western comic books.
Greek and Nordic mythology had characters fighting each other and it tells stories of how they perceived how the world was created back then, similar to the whole book of Genesis in the Old Testament and it's stories of how god created the world. There's nothing about laws over a single government or any other rules to society that is present in the universe Batman and Spiderman operate in to fight street criminals. Comic book heroes don't usually worship gods while they busting criminals for their country's government and working outside the law to help the state.
tldr: comicbook characters themselves are not substantively different from folkheros. corporations seize the reigns of both whereever possible
TLDR; you clearly have never read about mythology figures or have any understanding in the context of them. The OP in this twitter screenshot lacks this same understanding.
im convinced your reading comprehension is shit.
you clearly got the wrong idea of [robocop]
no u.
everything you said does not at all invalidate it as being proto-capeshit.
corporations didn’t even exist when mythology tales were written
you think im saying corporstions created the nordic shit? how fucking stupid are you. shut the fuck up.
superheroes are ... playing vigilante
yes. so do folkheroes, dieties, myths, legends, etc etc.
vigilantism is a common theme in stories about larger than life figures.
jesus whipped some dudes for inappropriate use of a temple. was he not operating outside the law to right what he percieved as an injustice?
davy crockett is a folkhero who literally went around extrajudicially murdering people, to the benefit of the u.s.
tldr: youre a fucking moron
waah waah! i called you dumb but youre a meany back to me! youre an asshole!
dont want none, dont start none
That's the best part of the post. I guess a lot of us only see folklore and mythology through a sort of Victorian lens, plus there are all those "folklore for kids" books that I'm willing to bet are most people's only real exposure to the subject.
Imagine overlooking 4 centuries of cultural (and a lot of it shitty ideology, but some good stuff in there too) development in what became the United States and then saying at the end, but superhero movie?
I mean you joke but the collective energy both mental and emotional coalescing upon a singular concept shares similarities between the two things. Clearly one has a massive cultural heritage while the other one is pop consumer materialism born out of an artist's creation. Idk I kinda like the american gods way of conceptualizing this stuff.
