Topic Brainstorm

Topic 1: Heroines from around the world

I think an interesting way to showcase the hero story structure found in myth/folklore would be to retell the stories of different heroines from various countries. This Wikipedia article conveniently lists an array of female warriors from across the globe. After a quick look through the page, there also seems to be a lot of beautiful artwork associated with the stories, so it would be nice to include those in the project. If I choose this topic, it'll be nice to learn about how heroines are portrayed in different cultures and whether some story elements are similar. 

Topic 2: Origin stories

The idea of imagining an origin story for some of the natural things found around us sounds fun to write about. From the class project topic list, I can see that many cultures share an affinity for moon stories. There's also a list of solar deities from Wikipedia that I found, which will be useful if I choose this topic. If I want a more general sense of creation myths, I can also look at this list.  

Topic 3:  The villain's perspective

I like the concept of flipping an existing story to show the perspective of other characters. Villains are an especially intriguing element of stories since their backstories are often untold. And as the writer, you can decide what their true motives are. After learning more about them, will the reader have more empathy toward the villain's actions or will they dislike them even more? This Wikipedia article has a list of fable villains.

Topic 4: Stories set in some of my favorite fictional worlds

This topic idea will have to be fleshed out more once I read more stories and find parallels between stories from the past and modern stories. But I would like to utilize characters, settings, and other elements from some movies and shows that I love. The cartoon Gravity Falls is all about a little town that experiences mysterious paranormal occurrences, which could lend itself to further mythological storytelling. Studio Ghibli movies provide a beautiful backdrop where magic and interesting creatures can be found. Animal Crossing is a game that got me through 2020 and it has a lot of fun characters and features that I think could work for creating stories as well. I can also use screenshots from the game to help convey my message. (The links are for each of their fandom wikis which provide tons of information for the worlds that the stories are set in)

Images:

My Neighbor Totoro (Source: Wikipedia)

Gravity Falls (Source: Wikipedia)

Animal Crossing (Source: Wikipedia)