Status Updates From An Illustrated Guide to Kor...

I give up. These stories have some highlights here and there, but as typically for stories written like folklore stories but being so long, they are boring really fast because there is no chapter or anything to stop and get a breather and so I tend to forget what happened in them.

a matchlock rifle? This cannot be an old story then, especially since the guy knows what to do with it, so guns must have been present already. maybe 16th century.

this dream with the blue dragon and the yellow dragon is the first time dragons appear here and oh boy, I am still in the Sakyamuni story. Who wrote these long stories?

she is sad that she has no daughter? I did not expect that.

ruler over India? Why is that in a korean story? India is quite far away. granted, that is not the weirdest thing, The protagonist is called Sakyamuni, he uses magic to transform into a 180 year old man... a corpse? And the way he gives fortune and children as reward and takes them away as punishment looks like a really callous attitude towards children and life in general.

she is pregnat and cast away in an iron box? I was sure that this would be the snake godess story that the first chapter mentioned. And behold when the box is opened by the fishermen they find a mother snake and 7 baby snakes.

Gosh, these stories are way too long to be folk stories. They are so long I have trouble remembering the details because there is no pause

If she has to disguise herself as a boy to study doesn't that mean her society is very sexist and forbids it for women and girls? So why are her parents so fine with he wanting to study? do they do this because she was a special birth after the 10 months pregnancy?

I remember a similar tale of a boy, ants and mosquitos in a tree during a flood, but in the others the tree was no god and could not talk. There is the other boy though and the woman with the two daughters, one her own the other adopted. But I wonder why none of the boys wanted to marry the adopted daughter, unlike usually there is nothing presented that was wrong about her.

I expected that the stepmother would be vilified but not that she would demand the livers of the seven sons to cure her illness. And how did the mother become a deer to safe her sons? And why is the father never blamed for abandoning his family nor when he has the sons neglecting his household duties? how did kicking the stepmother turn her into a viper, frog and then mole? Why does the father get away with all?

Offering her seven children as food for the dragon king? I know her husband ran off because she gave birth to 7 sons at once, but why does she want to offer them as food to the dragon king?

Gosh are these stories long and boring. And something is odd. This one element of the beautiful wife's picture flying away is the only familiar thing. And so many names are so long. The other Korean tales that I know had much shorter names. Are these really folk tales.

So, now the book changed to individual stories. Hm. kind of an improvement but not much as the first story here was oddly written.

So there are snake goddesses? Never heard of them. Allegedly they originate from a woman who gave birth to the child of a monk and was turned into a snake and gave birth to 7 snake daughters who basically protect grain in jars by being in the house. Reminds me of german house serpents.

This seems to be a lexica of gods so far. However, based on the contents, it is almost nothing but gods, so is this really a guide to mythology?

The structure of this book so far is not good. It claims this or that but since the stories referenced are only vaguely mentioned, I have not much faith in this so far. I would like to read the actual stories.