Mythpunk: Two Lineages

I

What It Looks Like

Gods and folklore drawn at the size of architecture, with a human figure left in the frame for scale.

Period: outside the calendar; folk tales carry no date
Power: myth itself, treated as the way the world runs
Materials: stone, bronze, moss, gold leaf, cloth, smoke
Palette: bituminous black, bone, one ember
Places: temple interiors, star vaults, ruined colossi, libraries with no end

Both plates predate the word by two centuries. The first is a set design, which makes it a god drawn to be built and stood in front of; the second is a deity leaning out of the sun holding a surveyor's compasses.

A crouching figure leaning out of a blazing disc of light, reaching down with a pair of open compasses — The Ancient of Days, frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy. William Blake, 1794. Public domain.

II

The Word Was a Joke in a Blog Post

Catherynne Valente coined "mythpunk" in a blog post in 2006, half in jest, for what she and a few others were writing. What she meant by it was a way of handling prose: start in folklore and put it through the machinery of postmodern fiction — nested narrative, linguistic density, confessional poetry, radical reinterpretation, structure treated as content.

The Orphan's Tales is the clearest case. Stories sit inside stories inside stories, and the teller is a girl with the tales written on her eyelids.

Its own visual ancestry is the folk-illustration tradition — Bilibin, Rackham, Dulac, Nielsen. Flat colour, hard outline, decorative border. Nothing in that lineage is enormous.

Flat, hard-outlined folk illustration of a figure in a patterned costume standing in a forest, decorative border — Plate from Russian Wonder Tales, illustrated by Ivan Bilibin. Public domain.

III

Then the Painters Took the Word Somewhere Else

By the 2020s concept artists were using the same spelling for something with no relation to any of that: colossal deities fused with buildings, giants carrying cities on their backs, industrialised temples, antlered priests against a red sun. Search the word for pictures and that is what arrives.

Neither group has read the other, and both are using the word correctly for what they do.

It is worth being precise about the mechanism, because words in this family drift in more than one way.

Expansion: cyberpunk. Bethke put the word on a short story about teenage hackers in 1983 and it grew, without contradiction, into an entire visual grammar. The first meaning is still inside the later one.
Separation: mythpunk. Two groups, one spelling, two unrelated referents, no traffic between them.
Attrition: biopunk. One meaning throughout, but only its most photographable symptom made it through the visual channel, and the argument was left behind.

Mythpunk is the separation case, and the separated half turns out to be the older art.

IV

The Picture Side Is Two Hundred Years Old

Everything in the concept-art version was worked out by people who had no interest in myth as a genre. They were doing the sublime — Edmund Burke's term, from his enquiry of 1757, for the pleasure of being overwhelmed at a safe distance.

Etching of a vast, impossible prison interior with arches, stairs arriving nowhere, ropes and beams — The Drawbridge, plate VII from Carceri d'Invenzione. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1745, this state 1761. Public domain.

Piranesi, from 1745, etched prisons that cannot be constructed: arches beyond counting, stairs arriving at nothing, figures on the walkways drawn small enough to establish how far away the ceiling is.

Blake, in 1794, drew divinity as an engineer.

Schinkel, in 1815, built a sky out of ruled rows of stars and put one person underneath it.

Martin, in the 1850s, painted the end of the world as a problem of scale: the city is a texture, the crowd is a texture, the rock is the subject.

Painting of mountains tearing apart, a city sliding into a lit chasm under a red sky, crowds reduced to specks — The Great Day of His Wrath. John Martin, 1851–53. Public domain.

Every one of them is composing the same shot — a person, and something vast, and enough distance between them to make the size legible.

V

Games Did It Again

Shadow of the Colossus, in 2005, fixed the grammar for the medium that now carries this look. You are small, the divine is architecture, and you climb it. Everything after that is in conversation with it: Dark Souls, God of War in 2018, Elden Ring in 2022, Black Myth: Wukong in 2024.

So the two halves of the word are carried by two different media. Prose keeps the literary version alive; games keep the visual one alive. They almost never meet.

VI

The Three Questions

Which machine rules: none; the world runs on story
Who holds power: the gods, and whoever gets to retell them
Who fights back: the reteller

The only world of this kind whose technology is a sentence.

VII

It Is Not on the Timeline

Steampunk borrows 1890. Dieselpunk borrows 1935. Atompunk borrows 1955. Those are positions on a calendar.

Mythpunk borrows "once upon a time," and folk tales have no year. It sits off the axis the rest of the family is arranged along, which is why it never quite files anywhere. Its closest relative in that respect is silkpunk, which also draws on a body of material with no date attached to it.