Kama & Hallie

A Smiling Critters AU with the Smiling Critters and Poppy Playtime characters as the characters of the HBO show, "The Sopranos".

This masterpost was made for the purpose of putting all the AU comics in chronological order.

Simply put, this is a very narrow-minded, gross oversimplification, and frankly very insensitive and offensive way to view and describe mythology. As someone who has always loved myth and culture, and who deeply respects my own country's mythology and how inherent it is to our culture, this is an extremely terrible argument against criticism of Greek myth depictions, and frankly a very western ethnocentric view of mythology as a whole. I especially hate it when they compare mythology to superhero comics as a way to explain why getting upset and complaining about this is dumb, because despite their possible similarities, superhero comics and mythology are simply not the same.

While yes, mythology isn't real and features very fantastical and outlandish elements, dumbing down the idea of mythology as simply "fake and fictional" shows a complete dismissal and lack of understanding of what mythology is. Because mythology isn't just "fantasy and fiction", it is an integral part of an ethnic group's history and cultural heritage and identity. It is an integral anthropological part in making a culture and the people of that culture what it is and who they are. So by treating mythology as just something dumb and simple and not worth thinking about is not just dismissive of the significance of the stories of that myth, but the people who that mythology belongs to.

It especially annoys me because I have a strong feeling that the very same people who say this would not say the same if it was dealing with other, espcially non-white cultures like say Polynesian or Indian or Southeast Asian or African. They would be up in arms about portraying the mythology and culture of these people as accurately and authentic as possible. But I guess because Greece is just viewed as another white European country, they think it isn't as deserving of respect and care as much as other cultures. Despite the fact that Greece, being an Eastern Mediterranean civilization, has more in common with the Near East and Middle East than it does Western Europe.

It sucks to because I feel a lot of people often forget that Greek people are still around today, or if they do know they just don't pay much attention to them because they are no longer like the idealized Ancient Greece we picture in our minds. We don't think about modern Greece because a lot of people prefer to view Greece as this ancient distant forefather of "Western heritage/culture" or worse "white culture", and thus many Greeks are silenced for speaking out because many people of Western Europe or Western European descent have this mindset that Ancient Greece is part of their own heritage and culture, and because they view Ancient Greece as this romanticized ideal foundation for Western civilization, they somehow are under the impression they know more about Greek culture than actual Greeks do, because Greeks are always being told that they are completely seperate and thus unrelated and unknowledgable of their own heritage.

It's also why I dislike when people refute criticism of The Odyssey's casting by saying things like "Well, 300 didn't have a Greek cast and you liked it just fine". Yeah, exactly. I do enjoy many Hollywood movies about Ancient Rome and Greece despite them having barely if any Italian or Greek actors, but we already have tons of those movies where they're played by British actors, so why not try having an authentic cast for once?