The Myths/Folklore Blog

For my storylab project from this week, I delved into the TVTropes website, which was honestly more fun than I thought it was going to be! First off, what peaked my interest the most were the “Horror Tropes” – going from there I was able to look into some of my personal favorite kind of things from horror movies/stories/media. My favorites (going into it) were “calls are coming from inside the house”, psychological horror, and ominous knocking. Furthermore, when I was looking at this list, there were so many specific types of tropes that I wouldn’t have been able to identify. Examples of these were: “Kensington gore”, “Giant Eye of Doom”, and “Eldritch Abomination”. I was pretty fascinated by the eldritch one, which described these alien-like beings as incomprehensible beings (basically the cosmic horrors that Lovecraft had written about). The idea of looking at something that would drive any normal person insane is quite a great concept to write about – maybe delving into the madnes...

Today’s readings included some Native American ghost stories, which are a bit different than the traditional ghost stories that most think of. In these, the ghosts are physical beings, present, ever-watching within certain areas of the woods. Hunters have to take precautions to avoid the ghosts while protecting themselves. In one of the stories a hunter is circled in upon, like a rabbit in a snare, by a multitude of ghosts – when one gets close enough to attack him, the hunter shot it in the head, sending them away. Normally, when I think of ghosts, I think of entities that can’t be harmed by normal weapons such as a gun – only by supernatural related objects. Other stories that I quite liked were the ones that dealt with the animals. In a bunch of stories, the rabbit was the “main character” where a couple of things were explained about why the rabbit is the way that it is. A depressing story that I read within this unit was in the second one called, “The Wakanda” where a boy wi...

The Great Plains stories that I was able to read this week had many interesting details that were associated with them. I liked how they described the world before life was on it. That it was just water everywhere – then the water would recede at the beckoning of an animal to one of the gods (or land would arise up). This supernatural sounding landscape, that would be molded before human’s eyes is an image that will probably stick with me – it’d be a good way to open some kind of creation story (or a story about the way things are). Other types of stories that I saw during this unit included ones that described the first time the Native Americans started having a tradition. Examples of this were: smoking of a peace pipe/why they would do that and why/how a pole was to be worshiped. The stories seemed almost dreamlike at certain points, with impressive feats (or seemingly important details) would be casually brushed over. I feel like one of the most important stories to this unit ...