Σ Frame

Mythos is built around a set of assumptions about what is important, relevant, fitting, and proper, AKA themes.

Readership: All;
Theme: Awareness and Introspection
Length: 1,300 words
Reading Time: 7 minutes

What is a Theme?

The most popularly known and long-enduring stories and narratives are built around an Archetypal Mythos.  Further, the Mythos is founded on a set of assumptions about what is important, relevant, fitting, and proper, and this Frame paradigm is generally referred to as a theme.

A literary theme is the central, universal idea, message, or underlying meaning that a story explores, providing the work with depth, purpose, and explanations as to why things are as they are. Common themes focus on the deeper meanings about relationships, life, humanity, or society that the story intends to explain or magnify. Explicitly, themes usually take the form of living conditions, social structures, moral and ethical ontologies, and interactive relationships between archetypal characters. Themes are often expressed implicitly through the characters’ actions, motivations, the plot, or the setting, and can be broad (like “love” or “death”) or more specific, such as the consequences of unchecked ambition.

Here, I’ll provide a brief descriptive list of the most common themes as seen through a cultural / historical lens, and assess what we are currently missing.