Missing Letter Monday No K; April A-to-Z 2018 Theme Reveal!

(Can I do this without one of the letters of the alphabet?  Well, I’m gonna try!)

So, after not participating last year due to having chosen a theme that required waaaaaay too much research, I’ve decided “to hell with it” and am doing April A-to-Z this year.  With (basically) the same topic I started researching for last year.  (Well, not exactly “researching,” really.  More just trying to decide what to use each letter for.)

In 2016, my theme was world mythology, with a preference for less commonly told myths, specifically those which hadn’t been used in video games, using the mythology-rich Shin Megami Tensei series as my guide to what had been used in a game, on the (probably erroneous) assumption that anything that had never been in a MegaTen game hadn’t made it into a game at all.

Obviously, that made things pretty complicated, especially since I had to use as many sources as possible (minimum two) to be sure my information was accurate.

So, long story short, I decided to do the reverse of that:  I’m going to feature a mythical figure who is in at least one MegaTen game, give the game’s text describing the figure (most games in the series, at least since the original PlayStation, have had a compendium that contains descriptions of the origin of each being in the compendium), and then what the actual mythic tradition has to say on the subject.

That was going to be my theme last year, only I had spent so long trying to put together a list of candidates for each letter that I ended up burning out before I even got started.  (Plus I had a lot of class reading, which wasn’t conducive to the prospect, either.)  This time, I’m not going to be as concerned as I originally planned regarding covering the whole world.  While MegaTen does include mythology from cultures all over the world, it does have a tendency to gravitate towards Asia and Europe.  Last year, I planned to focus on countering that gravitation, trying to spread the focus more evenly worldwide.  This year, I’m being more lazy, and just focusing on whatever happens to grab my fancy.  Though I’ll probably avoid most of the Hellenic stuff, since I’ve already got so much of it on my site.  And I can’t consider the whole MegaTen series, because I haven’t had access to a television for some time (for reasons) so I can only use the 3DS games (the two Devil Survivor remastered games, Shin Megami Tensei IV, and Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse, and possibly Persona Q) that I have easy access to.  (Yeah, yeah, I’m pathetic….)

Oh, and (despite this post) Missing Letter Monday will be going on hiatus until April A-to-Z is over, as trying to combine the two either requires two posts every Monday or ends up with really lousy posts.  Not going there this time.

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