There’s a thing going around on LiveJournal in which the poster picks seven interests from your user profile and you have to explain why they are important to you. I volunteered, and eeknight hit me with the with following: flying, freemasonry, half-life 2, libertarian, texas history, urban legends, and women. The original premise was to write about all seven in one post, but I’m going to take the long road and write about a different one each day. This is the sixth.
Urban Legends
Pretty much everyone who reads this blog should know by now that I’m president of horror RPG publisher 12 to Midnight. What many of you may not realize is how far back my fascination with horror goes. If you were to look in the books at my hometown library, you’d probably find my name on the checkout card of most of the surviving supernatural-related juvenile and adult books. I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on until I’d completely exhausted both fiction and non-fiction on the subject.
As a kid, I don’t think "urban legends" was even widely recognized as its own genre. It might not have been college until I even became familiar with the term. Since then, especially with the rise of the oracle internet, the collection and study of urban legends has become a gripping past-time of both layman and anthropologist alike. Of course urban legends go beyond tales of the supernatural. For every story of Bloody Mary, there’s a Jolt Cola and Pop Rocks.
What’s our (my) fascination with urban legends? Maybe it’s the same thing that caused the stories of the Brothers Grimm to flourish. Maybe there’s something inherent in the human condition to find fascination with cautionary tales and stories of disaster told in the context of settings we all understand. Or maybe we just like a good yarn.
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