Seems like Journey to the West is referenced and copied so much in Eastern cultures without any fear of it getting old or going stale.
Is there something similar for Westerners? Is there some Shakespearean story we keep re-imagining again and again without shame?
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Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been beat to death during Christmas season
The Canterbury Tales
You see the theme a lot, sometimes quite literal, like Hyperion, sometimes just a group on an adventure where each member has a story, like LOTR. Also in movies like The Breakfast Club, Love Actually or Snatch
Hyperion is so fucking good, I recently re-read the entire series again.
Canterbury Tales also has some amazingly good stories despite it’s age. I guess some things are timeless!
Awesome book, but I can’t continue past the Sol Weintraub’s story.
spoiler
As a parent of two daughters I was crying when reading it while commuting to work
The Passion of the Christ?
Because that’s a story form that gets used and used all over again, or at least is able to be seen in many a story.
Illiad and Odyssey are big, but I don’t think copied so much these days.
Lives of the Ceasers, even though less fiction had a huge impact on European story telling and narratives that lasts to this day.
The Odyssey is copied in form all the time. It’s not always referenced as directly, but virtually any adventure story made from a western perspective includes some elements of The Odyssey in a similar manner to how virtually all Eastern adventure stories include some elements of Journey to the West.
I’m very happy to be wrong.
Could you give me some examples? as I think that the strokes are just so broad it’s more archetypal journey story than Odyssey in particular to me.
That’s the thing, though, in western literary culture an archetypal journey story is the Odyssey. The Odyssey is just so old and was so important in Hellenic culture (which became the basis for most of Western culture) that all journey stories after The Odyssey were heavily influenced by it in one way or another.
Over Jason and the Argonauts, or Tale of Perseus?
I guess they’re less famous, and maybe I’m just being nit-picky. I’d rather just put them all as one level below ur-journey tale.
Tolkien. Copied over and over again. Essentially invented the fantasy genre.
Redefined and popularised is perhaps fairer to say than invented.
Story structure can be found in classical literature, setting can be found through European mythology.
Tolkien codified all the ingredients into a specific mix and brought the world to life, he didn’t invent the those ingredients
I should have said “modern fantasy genre”. It didn’t really exist before Tolkien. Closest is probably Robert E. Howard (1925-1936) who is roughly contemporaneous with Tolkien (the Hobbit was published in 1937, though it had been completed in 1932).
The Arthurian legends come to mind.
King Arthur isn’t “one story” though. King Arthur is closer to 1100s-era fanart / fanfiction culture.
EVERYONE was making King Arthur stories back then. And guess what? They contradicted. That’s why we have Excalibur vs Sword in the Stone (sometimes they’re the same sword. Sometimes they aren’t. Its a big contradiction because there’s no singular author).
The Chinese Great Novel “Journey to the West” is truly one story by one author with multiple millennia of copycats. Meanwhile, King Author is basically a millennia of copycats without anyone knowing who the original was to begin with. Very different fundamentally.
Journey to the West was written about 1400 (unless I’m missing some very key information), so not even one millennia of copycats, yet.
The odyssey
I’d like to throw Goethe’s Faust into the ring. Someone being seduced by the devil while they think they’re playing the devil to do good deeds is a classic trope.
If by “western” you mean “everything west of China”, then the Shahnameh.
If you mean “European/Mediterranean”, then Homer.
If you specifically mean “western Europe”, then yeah—probably Shakespeare.
If you’re okay restricting it to Britain, someone mentioned King Arthur.
Anything can be Shakespeare if you look hard enough
Hamlet is a favorite to repackage, I felt like I unlocked a cheat code to understanding media after I read it as a kid
Chronicles of Riddick was Macbeth.
I never thought about it until you said it, but yeah.
The Illiad and the Odyssey for sure. Pretty sure Homer is just the concept of a person that we think might have written them because all those stories were primarily told orally and told slightly differently with each recalling
The Odyssey for sure, for a given value of “west”.
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.
The plot of Hamlet gets reused again and again.
Famously, The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending, for example. Any other ones you’re thinking of?
You know, I read Hamlet and watched The Lion King. There’s an evil uncle and ghost dad visits. That’s a couple parallels but otherwise the plots are not overly similar.
There’s an evil uncle and ghost dad visits
Evil Uncle who becomes king. Former King becomes a Ghost Dad after Hamlet/Simba goes crazy on drugs. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (Timone and Pumba) jump in and provide 4th wall breaking commentary and comedy.
You seem to have missed quite a few references.
Ophelia doesn’t get driven suicidally insane in the lion king.
I’m not sure there being a couple funny guys is unique enough to count, comedic duos are a very standard setup and appear in totally different Shakespeare plays as well. Both center on royalty though, that’s true.
The ghost dad thing happens in completely different places in the story. Simba grows up in exile instead of being back from college at the beginning. The Ophelia thing. Everyone doesn’t die at the end in an accidentally comical pileup of errors. There’s no Fortinbras, but there is Rafiki. I can’t remember if there’s anything like the hyenas in Hamlet, but I kind of don’t think so. At best the uncle had a couple of henchmen.
If the meme was that they’re strikingly similar, I’d agree with that, but the meme is that it’s an exact ripoff.
I can’t remember if there’s anything like the hyenas in Hamlet, but I kind of don’t think so
Gravediggers at the Elephant Graveyard.
Eh, it’s a stretch. Maybe they included a bunch of bones thinking of hamlet, but they used them in a totally different way. IIRC that was another comical duo with little connection to the story, and then Hamlet shows up and makes it edgy.
Black Panther is clearly Hamlet in reverse.
Even got the spirit of ancestors / ghost scene, kings, wrong princes, duels and lots of killing.
The heros journey.
Its been copied so much no one really knows what the original was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey#/media/File:Heroesjourney.svg
24
Starring Kiefer Sutherland
QED 😌
