Mythical Creatures that are Stupid

Posted on by masercot

[I got this idea from Deb Whittam, so any complaints should be directed at her]

Image result for oedipus and the sphinx
“You want me to pull your finger?  I’m not familiar with that riddle”

Sphinx: A sphinx is half eagle, half lion. Cats hate birds, so why make an animal that is half cat and half bird? You’d just create something so frustrated with itself that it sits on a rock and asks people stupid riddles for the rest of its existence… and, when someone guesses correctly, it throws itself off of a cliff like a real drama queen.

Related imageMedusa: If a three year old had to come up with a scary monster on the fly, it would be a gorgon. “Mommy, she was SCARY and her hair was SNAKES and when she looked at you, you turned into a ROCK. Can I sleep with you and daddy tonight?” Not only are gorgons kind of ridiculous, but they are redundant monsters. Basilisks could turn people into stone and they are as real as you or I, depending upon who you or I are…

Image result for mermaidMermaid: They lure seamen, and for good reason. From the waist up, mermaids are pretty hot. Nice hair, good teeth and they’ve got a topless thing going on that sailors respond to pretty favorably. But, and this is important, THEY DON’T HAVE HUMAN SEXUAL ORGANS. They lay eggs like most sea creatures. Anything I could do sexually with a bunch of eggs laid on a rock, I could do without the mermaid. A sailor might get lured to a mermaid once, but it would be the most frustrating night of his, and possibly her, life.

Image result for harpyHarpy: Let’s see… a bird with a screeching woman’s head and boobs. Need any MORE proof that men wrote the myths? If the screeching shrewishness isn’t a dead give-away, leaving the breasts on is. But, it is nice to have something to compare the ex-wife to besides Godzilla.

Image result for hydraHydra: The hydra had seven horrifying, snapping venomous heads and when you cut one off, two grew in their place, making the hydra the most apt metaphor for life EVER. But, the conservation of mass tells us that each new head would have to be smaller than the first. After a few rounds, Heracles would’ve been fighting a creature with heads no bigger than those of a chihuahua. A few more decapitations and the heads would be too small to bite anyone. At that point, you would put a fence around it and charge admission.

Image result for centaur cuteCentaur: More proof that men created the myths: A macho barrel-chested guy with the sexual organs of a horse. It’s how every man see’s himself, except for the tail. The only way it could been more obviously from the mind of a guy would be if the centaur were a man from the waist up and the thighs down…

 

Related imageCerberus: If a dog is trying to bite you with just one head, there is usually very little you can do about it. Dogs are just good at biting and tend to have more focus than we do as we try to avoid them. So, why have a dog with three heads when most of us can’t escape one? Better idea would be to have one head and make it gigantic like Pac-man.

Image result for whaleLeviathan: Jonah lived inside a sea monster for three days, or forty days and forty nights… or maybe he just was inside of it long enough to ask for directions. The big problem is, we really don’t have a good description of it. If someone you knew was swallowed by a giant monster, would you be satisfied with NO description?

“Where have you been?”

“I was swallowed by a monster”

“Okay. Here’s your mail and I watered your plants”

Image result for elfElf: A tiny human who likes to sneak into people’s houses and make shoes? Were you high when you came up with that? I’ll have what he’s smoking. As a second and third course, I’ll also have what he’s snorting and injecting into his veins. And, to make matters worse, J. R. R. Tolkien made a few changes to the elf, in that he made them six feet tall and gave them literally no interest in the field of cobbling; consequently, many a Tolkien fan eagerly waits for gifts he thinks are made by Santa’s tiny elves, sees no contradiction between the little elves and the tall thin archer elves in the book/movie he so loves… and also he is forty.

26 thoughts on “Mythical Creatures that are Stupid”

      2. Coming up with ideas is the hardest part of my site. Edmark from the Learn Fun Facts site gave me an idea involving Cthulhu… So, that was this morning’s work…

        Oh, and I’ve got something on the Red Panda coming up. Actually, it’s already up in my permanent section but I’ll link to it in my blog next week.

        You are welcome to be my muse…

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    2. Actually, they’re a cooler adaptation of actual, historical horsemen. But all of history is a bunch of overlapping games of telephone.

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  11. Most “silly” myth creatures can be explained to be awesome. Kara-Obake, Japanese, I think. An umbrella with one eye, one foot, and a mouth with a long tongue. Very good at gliding, assumably, but not good at steering when gliding.

    Let’s rephrase that: A one legged bat with one eye. It is a vertebrate, so the number of legs determines how much fat it has. Because it only has one leg, it is all but skeletal, and thus, looks more like an umbrella than Batman, when he’s wrapped in his cape.

    Hectonchires: Big Giants. 50 heads, 100 arms. Rephrased: some sort of awesome siege tower.

    Ammet the Devourer: Crocodile head. Lion mane and body of cat. Hippo legs. Crocodile tail.
    Rephrased: Carnivorous Pachyderm with a long snout that, though the flesh is leather, rather than scales, looks like a crocodile snout. A mane of hair-like gills, like an axolotl. Rhinoceros legs. Crocodile-like tail.

    Keep in mind we don’t usually have the original original, and even when we do, the Ancient peoples were not (or were better, less archtypical) zoologists than we are. Mammals and reptiles are distinctions created only recently. So, sure, it may at first sound silly, but think between the lines. Even if it was always a made up creature, how could it be made less insane, while keeping to the original description?

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    1. Bestiaries from the Middle Ages are pretty funny… but taxonomy IS a Kantian nightmare. I think that’s why we extinct so many animals: Because we realize we cannot classify them effectively.

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Published by masercot