nothing is more frustrating than when I’m leading a serious discussion about the importance of learning how to properly research folklore & cultural stories from reliable sources and someone pipes in like “why does it matter if it’s all made up anyway?”
yeah dude vampires are made up and the whole “vampires couldn’t see their reflections in antique mirrors because of the silver backing” is made up so you can combine those however you want for fun.
but you can’t say “the Victorians believed vampires couldn’t see themselves in mirrors because of the silver backing, which is why Dracula has no reflection,”
because the author of Dracula was a real man who never said that and the Victorians were real people of a real era and you can’t just make up things about real people because it’s important historically for us to understand what people believed about the world and why.
Making up facts about vampires is folklore & literature. Claiming random people in the past believed that, with no evidence, is just lying.
Am I making sense??
“What if eye of newt is code for mustard seed and witches used strange ingredient names to conceal their spells’ true, more mundane contents?”
Fun, modern take on witches in classic literature.
“In the 16th century, eye of newt was code for mustard seed, and witches used it to disguise their spells. Shakespeare knew this code and used it in Macbeth.”
That’s a lie. Now we’re just lying.