Brian Wu, Period 8, 1/19/22

 Brian Wu

Ms. Fusaro

Modern Mythology 2022, Period 8 January19, 2022

Literacy & Learning

Blog 2

  Write about your thoughts regarding any of the fiction or non-fiction covered in class.

During the lesson on the Norse Mythology stories “The Death of Balder” and “The Last Days of Loki” the class was tasked with reading a research article published by the American Psychological Association. The article was titled “Revenge and the People Who Seek It” and its contents spoke about the reasoning behind why people seek revenge on others or why they do not. The article is split into three sections: ‘The avengers,’ ‘The revenge paradox,’ and ‘Revenge or Justice?’ with each section talking about a different concept of revenge.

The first and second sections of the articles reflected upon research done with people as to what motivated a person’s revenge and the feeling after revenge was executed or not executed. The research was done by social psychologists Ian McKee, Kevin Carlsmith, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson. One of the main findings that I did not question but thought about was the most people in the experiments felt better when given an option to invoke revenge and that a lot of people would seek out revenge, even if it took away from their own well being. Revenge. Punishment. Why do humans pursue action after wrong is done to them? Is it human nature? These were some things that were flowing through my mind when reading through these first two sections.

"’Punishing others in this context—what they call 'altruistic punishment'—is a way to keep societies working smoothly,’ Carlsmith says. ‘You're willing to sacrifice your well-being in order to punish someone who misbehaved.’" What I took from this quote was that people seek revenge to keep a universal balance. When one person takes revenge on another, they are ‘bringing justice’ to the wrong doing therefore creating equilibrium, which is what people enjoy. There is also a cultural aspect to this as people from places with a justice system that is not as good might feel more of a need to bring it out themselves.

Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception.

   

 The article on revenge when applied to Norse mythology really helped me to understand the reasoning behind the Norse Gods and their punishments. The Norse gods believed in the concept of an eye for an eye. If you did something wrong, you were to be punished accordingly but something that stuck out was that Norse Gods did not care about the motive behind an action. Anything that did harm to another was just deemed as wrong and a classmate, Gary, stated that he felt that the gods did this because of their culture and their nature. He said that Norse Gods were war gods before anything and in war there was no mercy and it was only about moving forward which might explain why the Norse Gods did not care about the thought behind the action, they just were not programmed to do so. When looking at Norse mythology through these lenses, many things start to make more sense, especially why Ragnorak was inevitable.

Another thing that I learned throughout the student taught Norse mythology lessons were archetypal characters. Archetypal characters by definition are characters who represent recognizable behaviors. The Norse Gods can be categorized into many of these. For example, Odin might be characterized as “The Magician” whose strengths are knowledge and power and weakness is Hubris and Thor might be characterized as “The Warrior” whose strengths are courage and strength, and weakness is overconfidence. My main take on the importance of archetypal characters is that they are easy to understand as they have set character traits. This makes the story easier to follow and sometimes the actions of a character are even predictable based on their archetype.

How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

My main application to the world around me comes from the article of revenge. Before, I would never really think about the nature of revenge. It was just something that happened and was driven by instinct and human nature. With a better understanding, I probably will think a lot more about my actions before I act on them. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "The old law of 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind." Looking back on this and Norse mythology, revenge can just create an endless cycle of revenge and hate which will just leave everything with nothing.