This is straight-up, 100% ahistorical bullshit. Not the part about comic books being modern folklore, because whatever, but the part about Nordic myths and European folklore being for kids. It only seems that way because we spent generations infantilizing it for our own amusement https://twitter.com/AlishaGrauso/status/1337263317727866880

Poptivism would come off better if the people espousing it knew literally anything else except mass market entertainment.

What we think of as the modern canon of folk tales, fairy tales, etc. comes from a wide variety of stories passed down for untold generations, generally as evening entertainment pleasantly drunken peasants. Most of them were never intended for children.

They got a lot of rough spots sanded away once they started getting written down and their fantastic elements were brightened up to make them more appealing to modern tastes and that eventually transmuted them to kids stories.

The pre-Grimm Bros. version of “Sleeping Beauty” is a rape story. The original version of “Rapunzel” is a straight-up fucking “Saw” film. These were twisted stories told by storytelling cultures that were infinitely more sophisticated than most people give them credit for.

They play to audiences that are looking for escape from daily drudgery and they build complex, almost inscrutable moral narratives out of the most base symbolic elements to provide that.

And that not even talking about Norse mythology, which is literally fucking religion, one that sees the temporal and spiritual realms as connected and imagined a rich pantheon of gods that reflected humanity’s multifaceted nature.

And yeah, it included stories meant for pleasure and entertainment because, again, storytelling cultures. It also ended with the destruction and rebirth of the universe.

This is not a fucking Disney IP, this is shit people thought about when starring into the blackness and thinking of infinity. This is who they called to when their blood poured out of them on a battlefield and who they dedicated their graves to and prayed to for good crops.

It’s kiddie shit because we made it dumber.

You want to make an argument for fucking Iron Man or whatever being a modern folklore the go try to publish your own story about him and see how far you get. Your imagination has a fucking copyright notice.