Our Recommendations

Mythogin features in-depth discussion on stories selected across culture.

We believe the stories listed on this page are engaging and interesting. They might not be the most insightful or profound stories—these are not necessarily epics with some type of hero journey. (For those stories please visit our Hero-Journeys pages.) But we find them to be dramatic, funny, thought-provoking, and/or emotionally satisfying. Before we get to our curated catalogue, we should mention why this is page is really necessary.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to identify quality stories in a media landscape drowning in unoriginal content. Large sites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes can provide statistically significant ratings, but such systems break down when users only rank stories with a 1 or a 10 score. If users aren’t willing to use the entire scale, then the scale itself becomes counterproductive: it stops measuring the story in lieu of measuring the polarity of the viewership.

Amazon’s system used to be good until they started selling visibility and rankings to distributors. By now, it's difficult to distinguish advertizing from actual user content.

Netflix has a powerful recommendation algorithm that can compare similar content. However, the value of their algorithm depends upon the quality of their content. When Netflix ran out of quality content, they started to mass produce generic content to feed their own algorithms. For this reason, their business shifted from being a content provider to being a mass marketer. For this and other reasons, Netflix is in serious business trouble. We'll be providing a discussion of this in our Industry Pages.

The overproduction of generic content and the dearth of objective measurment makes it very difficult and time-consuming to find good stories these days.

The purpose of Mythogin isn’t to develop new technology to identify good stories and filter out the bad. Our focus is more circumspect: to provide a transparent lens to evaluate stories. That way, you can determine how helpful this lens is to you or not.

Storytelling is deeply personal, situational, and intrinsically subjective. What moves one person on one day, might not on another. However, part of what makes stories "good" or "bad" is objective. This relates to characterization, pacing, premise, originality, plotting, and so forth. It's upon this objective basis, that it becomes practical to identify and filter out "bad" stories.

The lens we use to distinguish good stories is twofold (bi-focals as it were): the originality of the story is the first lens; the second is the storytelling. Just being original isn’t enough for a story to be good—it could just be weird. On other hand, some stories might be good, even if they are partly covering old-ground—because the implementation is strong (great writing, great acting, etc.)

Even though we can’t promise that you will like every one of our selections, we can promise that there is something of value in each one. It’s likewise possible, that your favorite story isn’t on this list. Please don’t be offended. We might have overlooked it. So please write to us and tell us why it is your favorite, and we will take it seriously.

We will be adding listings to this catalogue as we discover more content. And we will be providing more detail on our reasoning for the selection of each title as time allows.