The Sword and Laser discussion

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Although to be fair, I’m sure most of these characters are unfamiliar to most Americans, too. We’ve done a terrible job of teaching our history, to the point where Native American peoples are effectively erased in literature. (The truly terrible River of Teeth comes immediately to mind, where that book’s Caucasian author somehow managed to forget 25% of the population in her alt-history story.)

So, how immortal are these immortals? Towards the end (view spoiler)

There are actually two Coyotes in Navajo, one happy and one angry. Angry Coyote is the one who brought death into the world, but he was like Thanos in the MCU in that his reasoning is sound. Without death we would soon be overrun with people. Based on this it’s clear she’s using Angry Coyote. AC isn’t bad, nor is he chaotic. We just don’t fully appreciate his thinking.
Twins figure into Native American myths a lot — like a truckload of twins all the time — but they don’t follow the whole good twin/evil twin trope typified by Romulus and Remus and other European cultures. (In the Great Lakes region Algonquin tribal myths, for instance, their great hero’s twin is Wolf, who is a fierce warrior but not evil. In the Abenaki tribal myth, the twin to their great hero is Rabbit, who died and became ruler of the dead, but Rabbit is also a good guy who offers excellent advice.) Maggie’s lightning sword belongs to one of such twins, for instance, but the other is offscreen. Makes me wonder if we’ll see his brother in a future installment. Or the other Coyote, for that matter.


I think it’s his. I’d have to look it up.
Back in the day I was a big fan of the Leaphorn & Chee mysteries by Tony Hillerman, which are set in the Four Corners region of the Southwest where the Navajo rez is located, and my parents own a plot of land in Albuquerque (“the Burque” in these novels), so I did a deep dive into Navajo and Apache history and religion back then.
Coincidentally the excellent movie Thunderheart came out around that same time, which is set on a Sioux nation reservation. That segued into reading about other tribes and I was struck by the preponderance of twins in native folklore.
If I were to map Neizghání and his twin brother onto modern characters, I’d use Sam and Dean Winchester of Supernatural, neither of which fit the version seen in the book. They’re more like human heroes who kill monsters than gods.

And at the start, Dean was quite the Douchebag, expecially towards women. I'll map Neizghání as Dean at his douchiest, probably because Sam is dead at the Moment - that works.

I am a sucker for cool monsters from other Folklore, and I look forward to using these guys in my Shadowrun games.