Haberdashery

In the interest of academia, there's something that's been on my mind and most seem to neglect pondering it.

At what point, I wonder, does a mythological icon stop existing? Is being forgotten truly the golden standard, or is that what we tell ourselves to feel better? I've occasionally, genuinely, wondered if the pantheon of ancients is not as full as we like to admit and that there are shallow corpses wasting away in the strange no-space that is our tradition of myth and legend. As a Western culture raised with a debt to pay to Noah, was part of that payment letting Utnapishtim rot contrary to his immortality? Do Apollo and Ra, instead of fighting for believers who invest in their legends, simply carve out geographic territory that was taken by YHWH? Are they now dead with YHWH holding the greater portions of the planet in competition with Himself?

What I'm saying, eclectic haberdashers, is quite simple. Do characters die as new versions are born? Did Utnapishtim cease to exist when later writers cobbled his themes and traits into Noah? Do Ra and Apollo waste in hell due to YHWH's monopoly on godhood?

Did everyone die so he could live?

Then again, what about the Mayan creator god retroactively becoming a three-fold god by Christian writers who weren't comfortable with penning this pantheon to paper without modification? Is that an abortion or a sex change? I feel like I've lost the analogy.

Let's stroll into Power Rangers esoterica. When Bruce Kalish deified Zuban (that is to say, morphed him into the Sentinel Knight, canonized saint of the Corona Aurora), did this KILL Zuban? In whatever plane of existence our mythology rests, did Zuban cease to be as Sentinel Knight rose to being? Did Burai and Kou forcibly pull together and from their union bore Tommy Oliver, who continues to consume and assimilate other icons?

I...what? I guess? 

Is derivative fiction, which is to say adaptation or what have you, some sort of murder? Or is it how they reproduce, instead? That's a bit less depressing; fiction survives by constantly repackaging itself. To take a secular approach, fiction and myth naturally reproduce by crafting derivatives that must survive in its particular environment. Is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the end result of a slow evolutionary crawl to homosapien?

I ask a lot of questions, and you're not in a forum to answer. I sympathize. But it's just to get you thinking. Is the constant recontextualizing of fictions and myths murder, or is it Darwinian reproduction (or some third...creationist solution, surely)? Clearly, it's SOMETHING. Some sort of change, an upset. A shift that's all, like, paradigm and stuff. Passion or process, story changes. Story grows. Story depletes.

Story copes.

If only because it has to.

I think of myths, legends, and fictions as ideas. Communication. We are all ultimately defined by the stories of our society. They give us identity. But when these stories change, when these stories are consumed, things may happen to us that we don't totally understand.

Watch out for cannibals, is what I'm saying. Fuckers are sneaky.