Topic Brainstorm

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The only real knowledge of Gilgamesh that I have is the adaptations of his character in various fiction, but the little I do know about him seems interesting. The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered the 'first hero story', and the combination of a hero who can be arrogant and not always good along with the various feats that I have heard about makes me interested in learning more about Gilgamesh. While the Epic of Gilgamesh is on the shorter side, I believe that it is more than possible to take different parts of it and make them fully fledged stories of their own, especially when adapted. However, if that was not enough or didn't work out, I could do a single story to tell Gilgamesh's story, and focus on some other Babylonian myths for my other stories. As for the different ways to retell his story, given his position as a child of the gods, I could possibly retell the stories in a similar manner to my Week 2 retelling and have Gilgamesh as a machine overly confident and arrogant in his position and abilities as a creation of humans.

King Arthur

Similar to Gilgamesh, my only experience with the legends of King Arthur and Arthurian tales is through adaptations in fiction, notably that of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". While obviously I am aware that the original stories are nowhere near as comedic, the diversity of the adapted tales and the personalities (as exaggerated and comedically altered as they are) makes me interested about the original versions. There seems to be a large number of Arthurian tales just among our reading units alone, as well as the linked collection of Arthurian stories. Given the medieval nature of the Arthurian tales, it could be interesting to retell the stories with varying levels of modernity; some of the stories could be done with current-day technology and situations, while others could be either futuristic/fictional with mechas or somewhere in between such as Victorian or colonial era.

Heroes (Herakles and More)

Given how prevalent heroic tales are, it seems like it would be interesting to compare and contrast stories of heroes from different cultures. I'm not exactly sure how I would retell the stories, since there are so many different options for stories and cultures to pick from for such a broad topic. This seems like it would be a topic where rewriting the events or characters of the story, rather than mostly the setting or the type of person the characters are (for example, switching a human to a machine), could result in some interesting storytelling. The story of Hercules is a well-known one, so even with some more significant changes, people would likely still recognize the elements in the new version of the story.

Ancient Egypt

I learned a bit about the myths and culture of Egypt in school (I believe it was middle school), and I remember the different deities being very interesting, if only in the way they were depicted. Most deities had some connection with animals, such as Bastet and cats. In addition, the deities changed in what they represented and how they were viewed over time, which could be an interesting way to rewrite the stories.

 

(Bastet, Wikimedia Commons)