More Therapeutic Letter Writing

[badstar]

Dear People Who Are In Charge Of Disseminating Information On Mythology,

Greek and Roman mythology may have many similarities and parallels and stuff but they are not mirror images with a name change! Go do your research! It's not like there aren't plenty of original sources available.

Love,

Fuego



Dear Disney,

Hercules was Roman. Herakles was Greek. WTF is wrong with you?

Cordially,

Fuego

Comments

[forexample.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Disney has always made changes to myths (I include fairy tales in myth for this purpose) when making movies. Sometimes they make a good story, sometimes they don't.

As for Heracles being Zeus' and Hera's son, it's a whitewash. They may have decided the bastard son of the top god was too much for their target audience's parents to accept, or that the MPAA would have kicked the rating up if they told that part of the story along Greek lines. Kevin Sorbo's Hercules kept it, so some segments of the American audience can accept it.

In the end all stories are adaptable. The story of Heracles was first told millenia ago. Imagine what would happen if people tried to keep the telling of a tale from 2000 years ago the same, especially if it involved diefic themes. Holding modern practices to an interpretation of an ancient legend could cause all kinds of problems for society.