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Why are Myth profiles a thing

Ricsi-viragosi

VS Battles
Retired
26,116
3,649
I imagine there was a discussion about this, hence this is a question and not a revision.

So, why are profiles for characters with no Canon allowed? My problems are:

No Cano
Myth profiles are for tales passed from person to person. If someone said that the Easter bunny is an eldritch being controlling an avatar for fun, if it becomes famous enough then it's part of the character.

Sketchy sources
Especially for older religions, just about any ability is impossible to source properly. The few lines we have might be wrongly translated, and the source of the stories might be some group of five people writing down their fanfic for the myth (an exemple is the Divine Comedy from Dante. It's inspired by the Bible, but obviously doesn't fit, and genuinely reads as a wish fulfilment for a man grieving over his loves' death).

The Odyssei and Iliad were not meant to be a real tale as far as I know, but after the Spartans used Thatto learn both to read and to learn about their gods, it became legitimate part of Greek religion.

Contradictions
I doubt there is any one myth profile that doesn't have contradicting stories. The idea of a Hig h6-C Santa, for one, would probably be contradicted somewhere. In religions, the authors used deus ex machinas for their characters, or just up and threw abilities whenever, without worrying and often knowing of other Greek literature about the gods, monsters, or whatever else.

Modern myths
Same as above, but worse. With the Internet, there is no doubt that any one legend has a thousand interpretations.


Specific myth problems

  • Nearly all dead religions: almost all gods were slow transitions from other gods, and their personality, powers and everything else changed over time. Things like how Pan and Hermes were, as far as I remember, the same god originally.


Ps: Myths with set stories, like the Journey to the West, should be allowed to have profiles based only on the source materials.
 
>Non cannon

We tends to use official documentation on the topic, for example, I imagjne you're thinking of Greek Mythology where this was common place, we tend to take from Homor or such who wrote these all down and became a sort of cannon.

Additionally they tend to be a sort of composite of the characters unless they bleed into different mythologies like how we don't scale the Greek Gods and Roman Gods together.

>sources

Same thing here, we tend to use Scholarly articles and books on the matter, which are usually the best sources or such.

For example, Greeks, Homor was a good source for the Composite.

>Contradictions

Again, the same thing here, the profiles are composites.

>Modern Myths

Same again, Scholarly articles or the most common concencous should be used.

>Modern Myths

Same with above, we don't treat them as the same beings in the people at the time didn't either, or if they become different things/entities.

Pan changed over time because the Mythos around him altered him and he slowly changed to being mostly a Dead (literally and narratively) God, many of his attributes where given to different entities.

Also scholars tend to depict the Gods of different as they were at the time used.
 
This seems still quiet... eh. I can see the logic behind it, but I don't really like making cdomposite profiles for characters whose stories we don't, and never will, know the full story of.

I also dislike composites as a concept, they seem like an OC where you just take every power the character can have and smash it together to have the strongest possible character while ignoring several basic problems (contradictory powers that exclude each other by nature, no real mental state to pu the character in, the profile not being of an actual fictional character, etc), but that would need a crt of it's own I'm guessing.
 
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