brainstorming questions:

[thanate]

1) (direct) mid-size (10-12 ish?) red haired girl, lives on a giant sci-fi tourbus that goes through faerie. Likes machines. What's her name?

2) (tangential) What happens to your personal mythologies (the monster under the bed, your imaginary friend, the fantasy land you were going to end up in when you stepped through the mirror or whatnot...) when you grow up? [[do they change & stick with you, disappear when forgotten, carry on without you in some other direction?]]

All answers welcome. (personal/hypothetical/references to works of fiction/etc)

Comments

[pooka798.livejournal.com]

my fantasy land changed to different place that i've actually been to and want to go back to. sometimes it's a collage of the different places sometimes it's just one place in particular.

my monsters have always been insects. strange but true.

[zagzagael.livejournal.com]

1) gretl

2) Have you read "American Gods" - it tangentially addresses this. For me, adulthood changed my Personal Myth radically although I recognize the shadows and the edges. Boogieman, vampires, pscyho killers, dead children, ravenous dogs, dying things than pull themselves along the floorboards with bloody hands = death, taxes, infidelity, betrayal, heartbreak. The landscapes are the same, though...

What are YOUR answers?

[fishy1.livejournal.com]

1)Monika

2)all of those things, and more.

[kittymaru.livejournal.com]

1. Keri

2. I grew up? When did this happen? Someone please tell me now! All jokes aside, The world is a lot more cruel than it was before and the nightmares more real, only they're not monsters, they're human.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of American Gods yet (which is odd, as I was contemplating the "for the children" bit recently)-- I was more thinking about Neverwhere. And an odd little story from a Fantasy & Sci-Fi magazine about people who failed to pass on the childhood talismans that got them into magical realms and consequently messed up their lives and those of their children.

Your personal myths were mainly negative?

Currently, I think my early mythologies have mostly gone to rest in my back-brain or been swallowed up by the Wood (more about which later, perhaps)... I suspect not all of them are too happy with this.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Examples? Or stories that relate? (I'm sure other people have written about this...)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

There is that.

I was thinking less "what you're afraid of" than a broader all the maybe-not-quite-real things that no one outside your head necessarily knows about. Unless of course you adopted them from video games or books or whatnot-- large amounts of my childhood mythology were adapted from Tolkien and DWJones. Although I think at the moment that's mostly your dolls? (Where did Damien come from? Were there other people-in-your-head that were that kind of important to you before that?)

[kittymaru.livejournal.com]

I wasn't thinking in terms of things to be afraid of. Reality is such a finite term. I'm not sure half the things I believe are real other people would, and those are things that haven't changed at all. It's a matter of perception.

Dolls are dolls. They might teach me things about myself, but only becuase I'm taking the time to care and look.

I'm not entirely sure I have a childhood mythos or that I even really understand the question.

[kittymaru.livejournal.com]

I should also clarify. There were no such things as imaginary friends and secret worlds in my childhood. Such things never stood up to the real friends or the places out in the woods where the wanderers would sometimes camp out. We found shelters out there sometimes and made "pretend" weapons and played and ate mullberries until our tummies were sick. I suppose my machinations were grounded by real literal things.

[grauwulf.livejournal.com]

Random thoughts

Name: Mechinacea

Personal Mythologies: You start to grow up and not pay attention to the Myths, so they get bored and go find new children to entertain and be entertained by.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Um, personal mythology is a kind of amorphous thing... it's the fictional or semi-fictional things that you carry around in your head and believe in. (not even necessarily believe are true, just believe in.) So some of your personal mythology will overlap with most people you know [your favorite book/movie/video game that you relate things to, your idea of "the american dream"], some may be shared by fewer people [the concept of the perfect guy that you and your friend banter back and forth, the game you and your sister used to play when you were kids, the family stories and names for things that other people don't know], and some may be purely yours, like the story you've made up for your dolls.

They can be very elaborate and detailed and separate from your life [saladmonkeylamb's webcomic is her attempt to sort out her personal mythologies, flesh out the bits in the middle and write them all down. Her stories live in a comic-book world and all take place in the same city, and her characters interact or don't over a span of years and all have last names and everything.] or they may be little wisps of things [like the place in the woods where the wanderers camp] that don't involve any more story than that.

Ultimately, it's the concepts that cause you to relate to the world the way you do, or that you've made up to help you relate to it. Or because they amuse you, and stick around. The character your write fanfic about or the scary Jesus prayer rug or Martel as Batman, or the ideas you're trying to get across with pictures of dead dolls. Or the things you always remember about your mom, and the things you don't talk about because they're too important or too silly to share with other people.

So... my question is: the concepts that were important to you fifteen or twenty years ago... what happened to them? Or alternately, the concepts that were important to other people, who maybe had monsters under the bed or imaginary friends, what would be likely to happen to them as they became perhaps less important? What happens to the people you've made your dolls into if you wipe their faces and sell them, or pack them up in boxes? (I'm thinking mainly in a fictional sense... no need to be too literal.)

Does that help?

[kittymaru.livejournal.com]

That's a huge question. It's like I believe I can do anything and I believe in love and that dead people sometimes talk to me and that I might just be delusional but only sane people question their sanity.

I keep the Jesus rug on my fridge. Martel is Batman, but I'm Wolverine. (Martel really isn't Batman. He's something else entirely.) Aliens still haunt the shadows of my bedroom at night. Night lights don't keep them away. Neither do cats. They're transdimensional. I don't sleep with any lights on. I like to see the moon. Always have.

We also swam in the river behind my neighborhood and swung from the ropes in the trees like Tarzan girls and waded through water rife with watermoccasins and got eaten alive by tics. Sometimes I still climb trees.

If I were to wipe them and sell them, the personality as doll would cease to exist. When I sell a doll, it's gone. That's it and finite.

Have you heard that overpalyed song, "No Handlebars"?? I think that's about what you're asking. I find it compelling.

Maya is the missing piece of Jacqual and Mr. Ibis.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

If I were to wipe them and sell them, the personality as doll would cease to exist. When I sell a doll, it's gone. That's it and finite.

But where does "gone" go? Because who they were is still in your head somewhere... (actually, that's maybe one of my mythologies, that there's something strange/mystical/creepy about things actually disappearing. I mean, you have something, and you know you haven't taken it out of the house, how can it possibly not be there? And yet, there are things that have disappeared for *years* and I'm absolutely positive they weren't gotten rid of...)

Have you heard that overpalyed song, "No Handlebars"?? I think that's about what you're asking. I find it compelling.

I hadn't heard it, but just did a lyrics search. Interesting-- I think that's less about mythology (the bits that stick with you and turn up repeatedly) than dream or potential (I could do all this stuff, but the corollary is you have to give up some of it to achieve the rest) which is related but not quite what I was getting at.

Um... maybe a better example-- it's like Labyrinth, where all the people she meets/befriends, and even the labyrinth itself, are all her childhood toys sitting around her room. And they come back for her when she thinks she's ready to give them up. Except that other people have other takes on this theory. I'm looking for the range of options of what might happen to people's abandoned or forgotten early myths.

[zagzagael.livejournal.com]

My personal Mythic fears were negative....in a way, and postive, too - they made me more Alive.

My personal Mythos is very much the same in design, but different in content - ie., more about the Male of the species now and less about Adventuring as the non-sexual creature of my childhood. There were a lot of Horses in my childhood Mythos. Now there are Horsemen. Subtle but still....

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I like the distinction.

Have you ever read Dick Francis' Wild Horses? One of the tiny tangential bits is that the narrator is trying to film a movie, and wants a dream scene with wild Norwegian ponies riding across the beach at sunrise, which he keeps splicing into the finished movie until at the end there's (a stunt double for) one of the main characters in the movie riding one of them. ...Which is vaguely related to the picture that happened in my head reading your paragraph above, of a stampede of horses which then turned into an equally wild group of riders with one bending down to sweep the viewer off her feet. Kind of impressive, really.