Why don't human myths using animals usually make a monkey character fill the role of the king when we're the dominant...

Gorillas aren't monkeys. And if people thought they were men, why would they make them the kings of animals in tales?

>Gorillas aren't monkeys.

They're close enough. It doesn't matter for this topic to bring up a modern and somewhat arbitrary distinction between monkeys and apes.

>In English, no very clear distinction was originally made between "ape" and "monkey"; thus the 1910 Encyclopædia Britannica entry for "ape" notes that it is either a synonym for "monkey" or is used to mean a tailless humanlike primate. Colloquially, the terms "monkey" and "ape" are widely used interchangeably.[6] Also, a few monkey species have the word "ape" in their common name, such as the Barbary ape.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey#Historical_and_modern_terminology

Monkeys are too hilarious to be King of the Beasts

But we're basically monkeys (inb4 "hurr we're really *apes*") and we're also literally king species of the planet. Why did it work in reality if it doesn't work in fiction?

lions could kick a monkeys ass thats why.
na the indians knew it. check out the vanara.

they were the halfway point between man and beast. they talked and had cities, but occasionally chimped out and solved problems with violence like in the ramayana, unlike true animals who dont talk, and not like humans who can be diplomatic and have peaceful transfers of power

Symbolism dude

Look at the Lion

How he lounges openly without fear, how the other creatures stand at attention when he rises, how the other lions dutifully bring him food despite his own strength and jaws, how he patrols his realm in the dead of night, etc

A natural king.

Right, but why did we win control of the planet if we're the joke monkey character race and not the dominant king character race?

Opposable thumbs and ingenuity. Lions are big and scary so we made giant sharp wooden sticks to kill them at a distance. This eventually evolved into hunting rifles

because we arent animals

Humans are the meme character who went through edgy shit and turned into gadgeteer geniuses after the timeskip arc

Because the only contact a Mediterranean ancient civilization ever made with gorillas was Hanno's travel, and he only brought three skins to Carthage. Meanwhile lions actually used to live in the Balkans and Italy until ancient times, and in North Africa until as far as the XIX century, so Romans often made contact with them.

Didn't know about the Indians, that's pretty interesting. But I think other civilizations didn't really made the connection before Darwin. It certainly was taboo to think that we could be even related to an animal after Christianity became mainstream. If I recall correctly sometimes monkeys were even though to be demons by medieval europeans.

Buddhism has a euphemism about monkeys.

Its called having a monkey mind. People are like monkeys in in wild. They have monkey-mind. Sun Wukong is a take on this monkey mind.

As he journeys towards enlightenment, his mind is quelled more and more until finally he becomes enlightened. This is how the buddhist see enlightenment process as.

swk was probably inspired by buddhism.

he was a monkey who could talk and was a king, but chimped out a lot still

excuse me, inspired by the vanara

No, we're definitely animals. We're essentially a sub-class of the monkeys / apes (keeping in mind again that the current specifics of where exactly homo sapiens falls under the apes section is pretty irrelevant; in broad strokes, "monkey" is a perfectly fine descriptor for the loose category of what kind of animal we more or less are, as opposed to "dinosaur" or "insect" or "fish").

So now this goes back in the opposite direction. First it was why did we win control of the planet if we're the joke character? Which is answered with we had ingenuity and capacity for weaponry. Inverse question then is why is the creature with ingenuity and capacity for weaponry considered the joke character? Basically we know reasons why the monkey is a joke character and we know reasons why the monkey can be clever and dangerous, but how do we reconcile the two? Are these two aspects always halves of the same whole? On alien planets, would we expect each of their respective joke species to become the dominant planetary race? Or are the two aspects independent of each other and just coincidentally occurred together in monkeys on Earth?

It could have to do with tha same proximity that you mention, historical people tended to understand the obvious similarities between monkeys apes and humans, but generally they'd see also how fucing retarded monkeys can be eating their own shit and such and such so they'd have myths explaining monkeys generally as imperfect humans or some sort of diabolic attempt by the devil to make humans or something like that

First of all, not all civilizations saw the similarities between monkeys and humans, especially not the intelligence aspect. Also, there were no monkey's in Europe or the middle east, however there were plenty of lions until they were hunted to extinction. Either way, monkeys are seen a mischievous and/or whimsical, as well as rather benign (whether they are or not), lions are seen as noble predators, in which case, the monkey's genetic similarity to humans is a non-factor

>there were no monkey's in Europe

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_macaques_in_Gibraltar

>introduced by the moors
yeah no, europe and anatolia had lions for millenia, not monkeys.

he probably mistook them for niggers

>no monkey's in... the middle east

Weren't apes mentioned in the old testament?

Yes, they were the protagonists.

Yeah, but also like in 2 Chronicles 9:21.

Never mind, that's actually new testament.

Which means the baboons were brought as a luxury from someone else, not that they were native to the area.

Wouldn't it also mean ancient people at least had a concept of "ape" / "monkey" ? I mean, there are lots of types of animals that don't live anywhere near where I do that I have a concept of, and I imagine it would be similar for ancient people, though maybe with fewer secondhand material for them to draw from e.g. no internet.

Monkeys in fables are seen as clever and conniving and whimsical. They are thusly seen as tricksters.

The lion is seen as regal and strong. A proper ruler of its domain.

Are tricksters generally superior to rulers in real life? Will the alien species in control of their respective planets that we encounter in the future all be of the trickster variety?

/thread lol

Have you seen monkeys? They're little hairy funny behaving humans. Of course they're not gonna be kings.

Superiority is too narrow-minded a consideration. It could be that tricksters and rulers are mutually reinforced patterns of behavior that oscillate in dominance, periodically or erratically, in any manner of ways but always exhibiting some necessary interdependence.

>Superiority is too narrow-minded a consideration.

Can you really deny that humans have superiority to other animals on this planet? No other animals keep us in zoos for example. And there's also cities, the internet, and the fact we walked on the fucking moon like a ridiculous mythological supergod. Dolphins are OK but come on.

Lions are pretty, that's why they were called the kings of the jungle.
In reality they're more captain level.

>pretty

>he wouldn't fuck a lion

fag

I can deny the legitimacy of claiming human superiority if I resort to mirroring our indicators of that superiority onto the supposed perspective of other forms of life and subsequently concluding that doing so invalidates the accuracy of those indicators.
I don't feel it necessary to promote such a stance, but is it not logically consistent in a purely formal sense to assume that if we indeed, per your example, trap animals in pens and look at them or do any sort of things that to us make us concretely and experientially superior to the animals we subjugate in even a minimal capacity, that this might be entirely lacking in any context and might therefore be profoundly/irreducibly meaningless from their perspective?
I can claim personal ownership of the entire universe and name myself master of reality but I might be taken to task for making such claims.

Why did you attack me? I wasn't being hostile.

It was a joke, not an attack. Unless you're doing some sort of meta-joke about the joke right now, I can't tell.

>I can claim personal ownership of the entire universe and name myself master of reality but I might be taken to task for making such claims.

That's because you can't travel across or make use of any significant fraction of the universe. In contrast, you can fly around to the other side of the Earth in a matter of hours in an artificial contraption built and maintained by other members of your species. And you can make use of virtually any kind of natural resource the Earth has to offer through the use of the elaborate mining, manufacturing, and package shipping infrastructures humans have built up and maintained.

It's silly relativist contrarianism to pretend this isn't clear. Nobody honestly thinks otherwise except to make a counter-intuitive argument for the sake of going against the conventional.

but you can't photosynthesize, you can't reproduce asexually, you can't grow back amputated limbs, you can't see ultrasound, quite evidently you suck at life.

Those aren't accomplishments, they're inborn features. No human was born with the innate ability to travel to and walk on the moon. Or to build nuclear bombs that can destroy entire cities in an instant. Or to bind human outposts surrounding the entire planet with an elaborate telecommunications network. Or to build vehicles that can drive themselves using machine learning algorithms. It's really not a serious argument to deny the privileged position of humanity on the planet in modern times.

To me it is a question of framing. In most situation the framing requires people to be in the heart of things because most of our reality is informed by interaction with other people, not other forms of life.
This is because of a language barrier that might as well be insurmountable since animals don't have language in the sense that satisfies our recognition of what language ought to be, so naturally our interaction with animals is very limited if compared to interpersional relationships.
Advocating for some kind of admission of our ignorance of how other forms of life experience the world does not subtract from the accomplishments we've made.

You don't need to understand or communicate with other animals to recognize whether or not they're in control of you or you're in control of them. Also if a comet is coming that will wipe out much of the existing life from Earth, it won't be elephants or dolphins that avert the disaster. We're by far the only species with that kind of control over the planet level scope.

How do you distinguish actually being in control as opposed to having an as yet untested false assumption about being in control?

>How do you distinguish actually being in control as opposed to having an as yet untested false assumption about being in control?

By not over-analyzing really obvious things.

>If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

kek

Except Vanara != Monkey though. Vanara literally means "Of the forest (Ván=Forest). Vanara terminology enters Indo-Aryan Vocabulary after the complete compilations of Vedas. Vanara in its earlier connotations is used as a derogatory for native people who are encountered in the forests. Their dressing sense is described in much details and matches with traditional outfits of some tribal cultures. Unlike "Daityas" however, the Vanaras were open to exchange and thus were seen as "reasonable".

The Vedic Sanskrit for monkey are Plávangá, Márkát, Kápi, Jámbumát (literally the one intoxicated by Jamun fruit)

The thing I find cool and unsettling, is whenever monkeys and apes are portrayed as kings or have a society, they're always really dark and animalistic. Like when you think about it Monkeys are incredibly violent and just the most savage and primivite version of people. What other animals have characteristics like that that are portrayed in media?

Not at all - the monkey in that movie had the perfect role to represent humans.

We are Homo Sapiens - wise man, thinking ape. The monkey spreads wisdom and thought and is responsible for the magic rituals that hold society together.

Wisdom and society are kinda our things, and that's a shitload better than claws. After all, Simba can't drive a car. At least not very far.