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Mythology In Fan Mythology

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The definition of the term Myth is that it is defined by its content, context, and/or its function. Most often when we think or hear the world myth we think of ancient Greek and Roman stories that tell us tales of gods, heroes, and monsters; in the modern world it is also used to butter up advertisements, and of course in fan fiction.
When you look at the concept of myth it has been important to the practice and analysis of fan work, including fan fiction, on three levels: content, form, and theory. In terms of content, traditional tales including mythologies provide us with characters, narratives, monsters, and story worlds for fans to use in the generation of new fictions, as proven by the 2,173 stories in the Greek and Roman Mythology …show more content…

Instead, mass culture is a method of cultural control, a key part of the workings of capitalist domination.
However, there is a strong distinction between mass and popular culture that seems to be no longer defensible to most media scholars and cultural critics, studies of fan creations such as fanfiction have shown us just how entwined certain popular forms are with mass culture. Describing the texts of popular culture as myths then becomes a way of claiming profitable culture as common culture and the basis for a genuine fan culture that exists outside capitalist networks of production, distribution, and consumption.
Of the 2,173 fics on AO3, around half remain within the Greek mythic-historical story world: such fics set are set within the Iliad world rather than the Odyssey, as well as fics about the Olympian gods such as the popular Persephone/Hades, to the obscure, Helenus/Neoptolemus. The most common kind of story that can be found here is a retelling of a myth that fleshes out the description of the classical gods and heroes according to modern fictional and psychological norms. There are two main kinds of modern retelling fanfictions on the AO3 site. The first being stories about how the ancient gods and heroes have survived the modern world, and second, being crossover fics. In certain crossovers, the characters from modern popular-culture texts meet classical gods and heroes, as in liliaeth's The Pet Whisperer

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