Despite this, Journey to the West (a novel) and the Cthulhu Mythos (a series of novels by H.P. Lovecraft) lets lumped into the category. Of course in Journey to the West's case, the novel is itself accepted into Daoist culture and there are even statues dedicated to Sun Wukong. The Cthulhu Mythos, however, gets lumped in with mythology whenever the opportunity arises (most recently in SMITE where he's introduced as the BBEG), which is a weird flex for a series of stories written by a man who thinks black people are cats.
Relevant to SMITE - I lived with a Chinese family for a few years. The dad was born in 1970's Shandong, and he was very traditionally Chinese. Anything about China or Chinese history was his favorite thing to talk about and he'd go on for hours. Feeling somewhat emboldened by my learnings from Smite (and doing my own reading afterwards of course) I tried to ask him about various mythological figures: Hou Yi, Chang'e, Xing Tian... he not only did not know the word 'mythology' in English, but didn't know it in Mandarin either. He recognized 0 of the fantastical figures I presented to him, either by name or by image or by story.
Obviously he wasn't some kind of scholar for his own historical context, and he couldn't explain it to me, but between him and his wife I got the feeling that China's relationship to its own mythology differs massively by generation and seems to, anecdotally, just be different from how other nations relate to their own mythology. Totally off in my own world here, but I attribute a lot of this to the purging of artists and scholars during the cultural revolution, which surely severed a cultural through-line from the past to present.
It could also depend on which part of China he was from. There was so much "consolidation" during the Chinese revolution that I wouldn't be surprised if those stories were truly foreign to him.
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u/Flashlight237 9d ago
For context, here's the dictionary definition of mythology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mythology
Despite this, Journey to the West (a novel) and the Cthulhu Mythos (a series of novels by H.P. Lovecraft) lets lumped into the category. Of course in Journey to the West's case, the novel is itself accepted into Daoist culture and there are even statues dedicated to Sun Wukong. The Cthulhu Mythos, however, gets lumped in with mythology whenever the opportunity arises (most recently in SMITE where he's introduced as the BBEG), which is a weird flex for a series of stories written by a man who thinks black people are cats.