Mythology and its relation to Modern Anime Entertainment

 <-Did you know GAR and general manliness was invented in Greece

Kids, it’s time we discuss how little attention you pay during your history class, A great majority of the fantasy anime you watch is unsurprisingly unoriginal. Not unoriginal in that every anime takes elements from another anime, unoriginal in the sense that most things take elements that are about as old as dirt.

I’m not about to go about calling everybody unoriginal, today at least. Instead, I am going to discuss how knowledge of ancient mythological concepts will actually enhance your anime experience, making being an anime fan a much more enlightening. Your conversations with other fans will suddenly have more substance, as you will have a wide array of things to talk about and expand on your favorite series. This is fun for both the optimist and the pessimist, as the optimist can find deeper meanings in everything he does, while the pessimist can find further things to complain about.

This becomes apparent with some of the more mythology based series, such as Neon Genesis Evangellion. Knowledge of Christian mythos will help you realize that the concept presented as deep actually make no sense when applied to the mythos, and that cross shaped lasers are just dumb. Furthermore, while Shinji gets crucified in the end, casting him as a messiah figure just makes me facepalm. It would make more sense if Koworu was placed as a messiah figure, placing Koworu as the Christ figure, and Shinji as the Jewish leaders who killed him out of fear.

Now then, knowledge can be used for more than nitpicking. Granted, even doing the most basic research shows the mythological references in Fate/Stay Night (Great Demon Hercules…?) are wildly inaccurate, doing that research ensures that you can converse with others and tells you how little research your average writer does.

An underappreciated set of mythos belongs to the Greek pantheon, which basically ran a divine soap opera of betrayal, seduction, and just plain weirdness that inspires people to this very day. Alas, people insist on taking out the shades of gray and turning it into a bunch of black and white battles between good and evil, portraying Zeus as a good guy with Hades as a jerk, when both of them had about the same moral fiber (No, really, go read into them and get back to me.) The shades of gray nature is a section of mythology that largely goes unnoticed, despite Greek mythology being one of the most frequently used mythos in modern media. At the same time, it suffers the greatest amount of adaptation decay (Okay, I admit, I loved Disney’s Hercules, but nobody acted like they do in myth) At the very least, it allows you to perform intelligent sounding conversations comparing the mythos modern media bases things on, and how they interpret it.

The main reason I like to encourage researching mythologies of various cultures, is that it is just plain good fun. It’s like reading a comic book before comic books were invented. It’s not like the philosophers in ancient Greece, the Scandinavians, or the Celts had anything better to do besides survive and tell stories. I’ll admit, to really appreciate mythology you should probably look up a version with footnotes, but once you fully understand the concepts, it’s like doing research on a comic book universe. Anybody who enjoys watching high fantasy anime or manga would get a great deal of enjoyment out of researching the world’s mythologies that inspire fantasy anime and manga.

Please comment and Subscribe!

Why not do some research?