@lanodan @harbeau Funny you should say that, after I made that post I was thinking "Mythology comes the closest to lasting forever." Just today I was talking to my dad about how Australian Aboriginal oral histories contain accounts of first arriving in their environment (seemingly from a fertile basin that became flooded by rising sea levels) and of hunting early prey to extinction. These events would be from thousands and thousands of years ago, yet they're still remembered through the power of oral cycles.

This is how we preserved the Homerian epics *and* the Vedas, and it's exactly the solution that the "This is not a place of honour" guys turned to in order to try and preserve knowledge of the dangers of nuclear waste - an oral tradition, a kind of priesthood of Oppenheimer, complete with lab coat regalia.

Ritual preserves better than archiving. Your example of the Arthurian epics is a very good one - Arthur Mac Leod was a real man, so was Laoidh Ceann ("Merlin"), so were Gawain and his brothers, so were many figures in the Arthurian canon (but not Landelot lol.) In a way, our preserved image of Arthur as the ideal king and peerless commander haunted by tragic and romantic failings is *more useful* as a way of remembering him than as the prodigal son of a Scot warlord with an unnatural, Alexander-like gift for warfare.

The thought of a world where the figures of Miku or Mario or the red amogus become shorthands, then legends, then symbols anagolous to heroes, is a fun one. Thanks for that, that's a torch against the darkness.