Reading Notes: Filipino Popular Tales, Part A
I don't know if it was supposed to be apparent or not, but The Enchanted Prince reminded me a lot of the Beauty and the Beast plot! I did some research and it seems that beauty and the beast dates all the way back to France in the 1740s, so it's incredible how universal storytelling has become, even in past centuries. I feel like I come across familiar stories fairly often in this class, and it just reminds me of how geographic distance has seen so many variations of people and culture, but there are some facets of culture that have so much overlap, like storytelling. It's an opportunity to be imaginative and creative, and yet we still recycle and circulate some of the same core stories for centuries across the world. I don't mean this as a bad thing, but it's just interesting to think of how storytelling has evolved over time, and also how little has changed at the same time. There are so many different purposes, like telling history and culture and lessons. These things vary for different people in different places, especially when we date back to when populations were isolated by geography. But at the same time, we continue to reuse and retell the same stories, even if it's just rewritten with a twist pertaining to another culture. I'm not really sure how to explain it in better words, but the world is so vast and large that we have every reason to tell different stories of different experiences (which we do), yet we often still come back to the same ones and retell them over and over again. I think it just shows that some tales are too central to humanity for us to overlook them, which also means that no matter how diverse we are, we must still be more alike than we think.
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