Unleashing Campbell on TVTropes, or possibly vice-versa

[omorka]

I posted a version of this comment elsewhere a while ago, but: there have been several people drawing parallels between fandom and folk religion. The existence of the Thor movie - that is, a film based on a comic book based on Norse religion and folklore - has made things interestingly complicated in that department.

In particular, someone was complaining about movie!Loki being a woobie, and I pointed out that it was clearly delibarate - someone (I suspect JMS) wrote him as the biggest Draco In Leather Pants ever - but that, given the source material for the source material, it wasn't necessarily out of character. After all, there are still Lokismen and Lokiswomen among the Asatru, and not all of them are the Nordic equivalent of Discordians; some of them see him as a compelling deity in his own right from the myths, with complex but sympathetic motivations.

Then I pointed out that Loki is, in his shapeshifter aspect, a genderbender god, and there aren't that many of those. (Thor's been known to cross-dress, but that was just that one time. I digress.) In fact, Loki has three children; he is father to two of them and mother to one, and that one is an eight-legged horse.

Or, to put it another way, in the source material to the source material for the movie, both the genderswap fic and the furry mpreg are canon.

My interlocutor was not amused.

Comments

[scarfman]

Hercules also was known to cross-dress once. Achilles too, I think I recently read.

For some years I have seen a parallel between organized religion as a way of life in western Christianity before the Renaissance and modern fandom, and I'd love to write it up but I'm too lazy not interested enough to research it properly.