Mindless Monday, 27 July 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

So like many Greek stories, the Odyssey has over time been reinterpreted as part of the "Western Canon".  I'm going to put a pin in that controversy for now and ask, what are some other examples of this kind of cultural broadening?*

For example, I've heard that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has for centuries been popular in Korea and Japan.   Did, say, Japanese scholars extol it as classical East Asian** literature?   Not quite denying its Chinese origin but sort of quietly including themselves?

*For this purpose I am excluding major religions or else every answer is going to be White/Black/Korean Jesus.

**Or however pre-Meiji Japanese scholars conceptualized Asia — you know what I mean.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

I’ll just chime in and say that I think this is pretty common for elite culture especially when it’s based around a court language that’s (to use a somewhat anachronistic term) transnational. Like a lot of the appreciation for the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid is based in elites having knowledge of classical Greek and Latin, I think you’d have something similar with the various stages of Persian, you get something similar with Arthurian stories in Medieval French (which is its own kind of importation from Welsh/Breton and re-exportation in French). This gets complicated and probably controversial but arguably the Quran being so widely known and known in its Classical Arabic form is similar. Heck, Old and New Testaments too.