Signs & Portents

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Pagan News Beagle: Airy Monday, October 2 2017

How do you get modern audiences to connect with mythology? How do you reinvent a classic but obscure comic book character? And can a video game adaptation of one of the internet's quirkier creative works capture its original appeal? These are just some of our stories for Airy Monday, our segment about magic and religion in popular culture. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

We often think of mythology as something that is rooted in the past. And while that's largely true no shortage of authors and artists have worked to take the mythology of days past and bring alive it in our present time. At Tor.com, fantasy author Erin M. Evans describes how stories like The Wicked + The Divine succeed in their task.

Fans of science fiction and fantasy look forward every year to the annual Hugo Awards, representing SF&F fandom's favorite stories of the previous year. Last month, the winners of the 2017 Hugo awards were announced. If you haven't heard about them already, here's some potential new reading material.

Unfortunately, literary genre awards have also become associated with a years-long attempt by some science fiction fans to push out non-white, non-male voices from the genre. And often, such fans attempt to claim authors who do not necessarily share their beliefs and want nothing to do with them. This happened recently at Dragon Con where two authors, John Scalzi and Alison Littlewood both withdrew their nominations for the Dragon Awards upon learning they were being propped up as enemies by the so-called "Rabid Puppies."

Who is Ragman? You may have heard of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and maybe even Cyborg but this character from DC Comics is quite a bit more obscure. A Jewish mystic, Ragman is one of the DC universe's more occult-oriented characters, alongside John Constantine and Zatanna. At Newsarama, Ray Fawkes talks about how he's trying to reintroduce the character to comics fandom.

We're now pretty familiar with the idea of the internet as a place to consume entertainment and tell stories. But it wasn't always that way. When the webcomic Homestuck launched in 2009, the internet was in many ways still a wild frontier and it seemed a little bit... weird. Eight years later it has a dedicated fandom and now a video game adaptation. But how does the game hold up? Kotaku reviews.

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Aryós Héngwis (or the more modest Héngwis for short) is a native of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, born some 5000 years ago, near the village of Dereivka. In his youth he stood out from the other snakes for his love of learning and culture, eventually coming into the service of the local reǵs before moving westward toward Europe. Most recently, Aryós Héngwis left his home to pursue a new life in America, where he has come under the employ of BBI Media as an internet watchdog (or watchsnake, if you will), ever poised to strike the unwary troll.

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