My Topic Brainstorm for Week 2

Creation Stories (Geographical Creation Stories): I think that I have mentioned liking these kinds of stories in my Week 2 Reading Overview in reference to the "Tales of Balarama" and how the geography of India was changed. I like these kinds of stories because they can provide an outlandish reason for how a prominent landmark was made or why the world looks the way it does. In that post, I talked about Paul Bunyan and how there were many stories that show how his actions affected the landscape of America.

Supernatural Characters of the Ramayana: In my Storybook Favorites post I talked about how I was influenced by books like the Percy Jackson series and how they gave me a fascination with the gods and their interactions with humans. But there are other important players to these stories and these are the mythological creatures that are neither god or human. After reading about the rakshasas and asuras, their role as superior warriors and demigods makes them the perfect balance between gods and humanity. Both creatures are particularly interesting because they differ on whether they are good or evil.

Weapons of the Gods: In reading about the rakshasas, and specifically Indrajiit, it was interesting to see how the rakshasas could obtain incredibly powerful weapons from the gods that they could use. Indrajiit had three immensely powerful weapons in what is called the Trimurti and a slew of other supernatural weapons that aided him in battle. Another thing that is different from the weapons and their wielders of other mythology is that it seems like there are a lot of characters who have utilized these weapons that there is a significantly larger amount of weapons.

Epics Battles: Back in high school history class, we were assigned different chapters of to present to the class so that we became the teacher. Two of the three chapters that I had to present were centered on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Because of this I spent a lot of time researching the battles and even found these battle gifs that depicted the battle formations and their movements in gif format. That, coupled with my interest in mythology, makes this topic sound interesting. This topic could also tie into the Weapons of the Gods topic. After reading a little bit about the warfare in the Vedic period, the use of war elephants and flying chariots are really cool. It might be cool to bring these epic battles into a different time period or war.

Statue of Bhima's Gada

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