Why Greek, Roman and Norse mythologies are overused, where others rarely get used?
Greek and Roman mythologies are almost the same, and they spread throughout all their conquered lands because they enforced their religion upon them, and any foreign religion was subsumed as ‘oh, that’s just another name for jupiter or something’.
The Greeks and Romans left so many written records and the Greek language is still alive, while Latin is well understood.
Hindu mythology also stayed very firmly alive, but only among people in India, and nobody else cared. Buddhism doesn’t have the same kind of mythology, and it’s different depending on where you go, and even the local politics (actually so is hindu mythology, it’s basically the marvel comics universe but where each village priest makes up a few minor gods for themselves). China and Japan do have their own, pre-buddhist mythology, we see that a lot in anime.
Native American mythology was killed, a few times, by disease, violence, but mostly brutal Christianity.
Finally the Norse gods spent some time in England and Europe, after the Romans and Greeks, so they have some presence where they were considered interesting.
Mostly, English-centric literature and media, and literature students study it EXTENSIVELY for their degree, basically as a deconstruction of the evolution of storytelling and underlying tropes/archetypes. Less of this spread from elsewhere.
Greek and Roman mythologies are almost the same
Kind of. They’re like bananas and plantains - they look similar, they have a similar origin, but once you bite into them they taste completely different.
A lot of the similarities are shared since the beginning, as they backtrack to the ancient Indo-European polytheism; you often see those similarities popping up in Norse mythology and Hinduism, for the same reason.
And beyond that, the Romans went out of their way to interpret foreign gods as variations of their own native gods, or outright copy them; not just the Greek ones, even stuff like Isis and Yahweh. So those similarities between Roman and Greek mythologies got actively reinforced once the Romans conquered Greece, and you got gods like Apollo and Bacchus being borrowed.
But the Romans still had their own specific gods, without Greek equivalents; like Janus Bifrons, who governs transitions and gates. And I feel like there’s some “humanity” in the Greek myths absent from the Roman myths, almost like one saw the gods as powerful but flawed individuals and another as aspects of nature. For example you can cheat a Greek god and get away with it, but not a Roman one.
[Sorry for the info dump. I love this stuff.]
They are pretty fucking sweet
I can’t speak for the people who brought this on, but I would guess it’s a combination of how much they were adhered to as well as the complexity, uniqueness, and effectiveness of the narratives attached to them.
I once read a fairly interesting take on this: Historical settings are often chosen to wrap the story in a certain context in order to allow the reader to picture the style and theme without having to establish and explain a new setting first, so basically you skip on world building. If you read an analogy to Zeus you will immediately have an image in mind as well as a bunch of characteristics, no need to establish that beforehand.
Now, considering this it makes sense to choose a setting people already know - the 16th centruy Ottoman Empire is certainly interesting, but the average reader might know next to nothing about it and you have to explain everything first.
Why are these three settings used so much? Well, it’s positive feedback! Literature, Theatres and Video Games will select something well known and it receives popularity. In addition, a piece of media using a less-popular setting will have to a) compete with other media to become popular and b) provide plenty of worldbuilding in order to have the setting make sense. A piece of media that both establishes a “new” setting AND is very popular is going to be rare, making the entry of a new mythology/historical setting into mainstream difficult.
I think there’s at least 3 factors at play here.
First, you’re probably living in a largely eurocentric bubble. You’re not seeing other mythologies because they’re not being marketed to you, and in some cases you may not even realize some of the ways that those mythologies and folklore and such are being presented to you because you just don’t know what to look for (for example, Dragon Ball, in the beginning, borrowed very heavily from the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, which is a hugely important book in Asian literature, and I swear every couple of years there’s some new adaptation coming out, but it’s not nearly as well known to Western audiences) and translations can get a little wonky, if you watch a movie or read a book from a non-western culture, instead of naming specific deities or other mythological figures, the translator may figure that no one reading the translation is going to know who that is so they’ll translate it as something generic like “god” or “a great hero” instead of naming names.
Second, Western media is huge, and kind of overshadows a lot of other cultures. White Americans making movies in Hollywood are going to tend to pull from their own cultural backgrounds, and that often includes Greek, Norse, and Roman mythology.
Finally, a lot of it comes down to which mythologies we have actual written records of. The Norse, Greeks, and Romans all wrote about their gods to some extent, Slavic people, on the other hand, did not write until after they’d been converted to Christianity (the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian and some other Slavic languages takes it’s name from Saint Cyril, who helped to christianize the Slavic peoples, and was developed by his followers,) so there’s no real first-hand accounts of their beliefs and practices, only second-hand accounts from other cultures who interacted with them and wrote down what they observed, and people recalling stories they’d heard about earlier times, and that comes with them inserting their own biases and interpretations and just plain getting things wrong. So if you wanted to write something about, for example, the Slavic gods Perun and Veles, you probably wouldn’t have as much decent source material to work from as if you wanted to write about the roughly equivalent Norse gods- Thor and Loki.
