Sadly Mythtaken

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"Yes, Hera, the jealous bitch-rage queen who basically embodied the female id, would know nothing about these so-called 'emotions'."

— The Nostalgia Chick, on Xanadu

When the writers take aspects from an intricate mythology or religion, twist their original meaning, and use them out of context for something far from its original purpose. It can be people, places, objects, anything up to and including God. Maybe they didn't check their facts, or maybe they did after all, but they assumed (perhaps rightly, perhaps not) that they didn't need to be accurate if they were using names and figures in a new context and purpose. It's not necessarily Faux Symbolism, because often they don't even pretend to have intended some deep religious meaning behind it.

To be fair, many ancient sources don't agree on the specific interpretations of individual myths and legends, and many ancient writers would reinterpret them to prove whatever point they were trying to make. For example, most contemporary portrayals of the sorceress Medea have the deaths of her children be an accident, or a case of mistaken interpretation where the children turn out all right at the end. It wasn't until Euripides' play that Medea was turned into the purposeful murderess of her own offspring (even if she had the tiniest bit of sympathetic motivation for doing so), making this Older Than Feudalism.

This frequently happens to any god, no matter how benign, who happens to have any dominion over death or the underworld. Underworld gods get a bad rap from people assuming Bad Powers, Bad People — or that any underworld god must be evil like the Christian Devil. Religious and mythological characters are often Sadly Mythtaken for characters from other religions and mythologies.

In Western media, due to the Jesus Taboo and the like, pagan mythologies are more susceptible. The Japanese, on the other hand, have no qualms about bizarre portrayals of Christianity — or Shinto, for that matter.

Sometimes this is the result of cultural appropriation where the cultural practices of one group are picked up by other people which sometimes causes myths or rituals to take on new meanings. This is one of the reasons why Our Monsters Are Different is what it is. May be accompanied by Symbology Research Failure. Contrast External Retcon, where the work is well aware of what a previous story or legend says and intentionally "reveals" that the events happened differently.

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Pandora Jewelry. Sounds innocent enough... but if you know the actual myth of Pandora, it is HILARIOUS. The SparkNotes version? Woman opens tempting-looking box and unleashes evil upon the world. All the valuable blessings inside were lost just because she opened the box for the first time. And there wasn't even a box! The real container was a water jug called an amphora, but the words for box and jug were similar enough to confuse, and we all know how that turned out!
The Volkswagen Phaeton, although named after a certain type of carriages of and cars, instead of directly alluding to the mythological character. Phaeton/Phaethon was the son of the Greek sun god Helios, who tried out his father's sun chariot, but totally lost control, caused quite a high amount of destruction, and got himself killed due to this very early case of reckless teenage driving. Whether he crashed it or Zeus was forced to destroy it with a thunderbolt to stop the impending apocalypse depends on what version of the myth you’re reading.

Anime & Manga

Ah! My Goddess. The goddesses Urd, Belldandy and Skuld are named after the Norns (Verthandi, which contains sounds not available in Japanese, was not checked against the original Norse, creating "Belldandy" in the translation). Or more accurately, the primary Norns, who were responsible for overseeing the fate of Yggdrasil rather than any of the individuals who lived in it, who were watched by the countless number of lesser Norns (This is alluded to by having the sisters work at maintaining the Yggdrasil computer before coming to Earth in the story). Their connection to past, present and future is actually borrowing from the legend of the Greek fates. The goddesses are also the daughters of Tyr, despite the fact that there was no connection between their myths (the Norns are technically Jotuns, not Aesir or Vanir).
In Digimon Adventure, Centaurmon is the monster based on the Centaur that lives in a Labyrinth. One really wonders if the designers were instead thinking of the Minotaur.
In Aquarian Age, the "Age of Aquarius" is... a secret war that's gone on for thousands of years. As opposed to, y'know, a time of peace and prosperity that's recently begun or about to begin.
The Happy Science film Hermes: Winds of Love features Eros as the son of the title character and Aphrodite after marrying, which is far from accurate to the original source material. While some of the original myths depict Eros as Aphrodite's son or created from the concepts of Dawn and Night, none of them depict Hermes as his father. Moreover, Happy Science probably took this license because they didn't want to deal with any implications that could come from the name of Hermes and Aphrodite's actual son, Hermaphroditus.
Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko includes two characters named Lingam and Yoni, which are not only symbolic for Hindu deities, but refer to the male and female sex organs.
Mazinger Z and another series of the Mazinger universe (Great Mazinger, Mazinger Z, Shin Mazinger) did this with the Greek myths.
- In the original myths Hades was the God of Underworld, his default shape was humanoid (but like all Greek deities he was a shape-shifter), and even though he was not exactly a nice guy, he was not worse than his relatives. In the Mazinverse he is a God of Evil whose (unchangeable) shape is that of a giant being of fire and wishes conquering the surface world.
- Z Mazinger is worse in that regard: the Greek gods were Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that ancient Greeks mistook for gods, Zeus was a rebel turned on their comrades to protect the humans, and Mazinger was his own Humongous Mecha.
- Again in Shin Mazinger Zeus shows up but he is way different of the myth -let's say his severed hand is used to build the God Scrander-, and Hades is again a flaming, humongous God of Evil.
Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok ran away Norse myth and produced special results.
Kamigami no Asobi might be the most heartwarming example here (the anime, at least). In Norse mythology, there are various ways the story is said to have gone down, but the gist of it is that Loki kills Baldr, or tricks someone else into it, For the Evulz, and sets off a massive war by killing the god everyone loved. In Kami Aso, though, Loki had to kill Baldr because Baldr was fated to transform from the God of Light into the God of Destruction - something about balance. But Loki was actually in love with Baldr and didn't want to have to kill him. After some heartwrenching drama, and heartwarming moments as the rest of the Crossover Cosmology harem tries to save them, Baldr doesn't have to die in the end, and they can be happy together.
Kinnikuman blundered badly with this. Supposedly, there are lots and lots of gods out there of various planets, yet there's still Satan, and he's still the mastermind of all the Akuma Choujin/Demon Supermen. But Choujin don't go to Hell, they go to an underworld led by Choujin Enma. Then there's Ashuraman, who at least is correct in his depiction as a three-faced, six-armed individual. Of course, then we find out about his teacher, Samson Teacher who later becomes Satan Cross, one of the final Big Bad's subordinates, who displays similar similar anatomy but has no reference to biblical Samson or Satan at all.
In Cardcaptor Sakura there's a scene of Eriol expressing the spirit of church hymns...Except he totally didn't do the research, and winds up describing Shinto instead of Christianity.
Baccano!:
- Played for humor where Isaac and Miria start talking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms but then begin confusing it with Jiraiya Goketsu Monogatari (he begins claiming the three characters are represented by a snake, frog, and slug) and then claims Liu Bei fought alongside Billy the Kid.
- In the Light Novels, Isaac corrects Miria's notion that Frankenstein was the name of the monster instead of the doctor. The monster's name? Why, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelly, of course!
Yu-Gi-Oh! with Egyptian mythology, paying only basic homage to it and basically crafting its own mythology with the Egyptian background being only color flavor at best. The God Cards are a mixed bag: The Winged Dragon of Ra is the most accurate, though Ra having a Dragon is alien to the mythology ^note; Slifer is just an in-joke by the developers while in Japanese it is "Saint Dragon of Osiris"; Obelisk is named after a type of monument the Egyptians made.
Campione!:
- The series justifies its treatment of Heretic Gods because this trope occurs in universe. Older gods are integrated into new religions, their natures and origins twisted to fit the new theology. Heretic Gods manifest when they rebel against some aspect of the Myth that has been layered on them over the years, such as a victorious god seeking defeat or a subordinate goddess seeking to regain her lost throne.
  - Example: Athena began existence as the dominant mother goddess of her people and was represented by a serpent. When she was adopted into the Greek pantheon, she was split into the dual aspects of Athena the goddess and Medusa the serpent. Medusa was slain by Perseus, representing the loss of her power, and Athena became the daughter of Zeus, thus subordinating her to him.
Sword Art Online explains that this trope is from the Cardinal System, a type of artificial intelligence that controls the eponymous MMORPG (and later Alfheim Online). It scours human mythology for various characters, items, and tropes; then throws them into barely recognizable, randomly generated quest-lines to keep things interesting for the players.
Fushigi Yuugi uses The Four Gods, each assigned to a particular country, with his own virgin priestess and her guardians. While there really were deities named Suzaku, Seiryuu, Byakko, and Genbu in Chinese Mythology, they were very minor deities. They did not have a whole religion devoted to them, nor did they have their own shrines/temples, or priestesses (virgin or otherwise). Rather, they were thought to have guardianship over a particular portion of the night sky and the constellations therein, and could be invoked for such things as fertility, or victory in war. As the setting is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of China, it would also be missing the fifth deity, the "Yellow Dragon" situated in the center.^note
Touhou Ibarakasen ~ Wild and Horned Hermit has a Lampshaded In-Universe example: In one chapter, Kogasa Tatara (a Karakasa) tries to convince Reimu to hire her for a metalworking job, citing the fact that Hitotsume-kozo (one-eyed Youkai) are well-known as legendary blacksmiths. Kasen wonders how in the world Kogasa qualifies as "one-eyed"^note, but true to her word she does an excellent job.
In Dr. STONE, Senku becomes wildly surprised when he learns how diluted the story of Momotarō has become over the millennia, particularly how the monkey, pheasant and dog are replaced by beasts like a lion, a gorilla or a crocodile according to how the village kids were told by Ruri.
Little Witch Academia (2017) has one episode set in Finland, Lotte's home country, where Akko meets and befriends a yeti. However yeti are not creatures from Finnish (or European) folklore at all, a troll would've been more apt. Furthermore, during the episode the yeti gets literally trolled on his smartphone (It Makes Sense in Context... or maybe not), so the writers also missed the obvious pun.
Record of Ragnarok drastically mixes up the backgrounds, history and abilities of the divine beings that feature in it — of course, it is equally well-researched concerning the historical human characters who oppose them, so it is at least balanced on that front.

Art

The Fallen Angel: Artistically reinterpreting the Christian and Grecoroman canon was a common trend during the Neoclassicism. This was done by idealizing the subjects and humanizing them (i.e., Eldritch Abominations were portrayed as humanoids). In this case, Cabanel did a reinterpretation of a reinterpretation. Paradise Lost already humanizes Lucifer by delving into his rhetoric and sentiments (even if Evil causes his gradual Villainous Breakdown). Alexandre Cabanel adds an extra layer to it by presenting Lucifer as a Troubled, but Cute young man instead of a seven-headed serpent. It makes it easier for the viewer to relate to Lucifer and see the pain his own evil has caused him. So, in this case, it's not sad but brilliant and done from a respectful place (Cabanel himself was a Christian).
Thor's Fight with the Giants: The fact that the explicitly bearded red-head Viking thunder-god Thor is portrayed as clean-shaven and towheaded like Prince Charming probably didn't help dissuade the Master Race proponents that interpret it as proto-Fascist/Nationalist propaganda.
Primavera: It is unknown why Sandro Botticelli chose this grouping of Roman mythology characters to hang out in a garden, since there aren't any myths that have them all together.
Frank Frazetta's depiction of Eowyn confronting the Witch-King from The Lord of the Rings took some liberties that served Frazetta's signature style over Tolkien's lore. First of all, it shows Eowyn wearing a very feminine suit of armor when she was meant to be disguised as a man. It also shows the Witch-King with muscular limbs, when the curse that made him into what he is also made his physical body invisible without his cloak and armor.

Comic Books

Aquaman: A panel in Aquaman (1962) #17 has Aquaman mistakenly call Poseidon Zeus's son instead of his brother. All other instances in the story correctly depict them as brothers, so we can assume this was an in-universe mistake.
Black Panther: Wakanda has always worshipped a panther deity, but the volume 3 series, published in 2000, retconned the Patron God of Wakanda to be an aspect of the goddess Bast—an Egyptian goddess, not an East African one (first introduced to Marvel in Fantastic Four (1961) #52 in 1966). The 2009 Encyclopedia Mythologica retroactively justifies this as an example of Interfaith Smoothie: Wakanda is close enough to southern Egypt that it absorbed some of ancient Egypt's religious practices through cultural exchange.
Doctor Who (Titan): "The Swords of Kali" falls squarely into the British imperialistic "Kali is the Hindu God of Evil whose followers were all Thugee" misconception. Some later editions of the collection use a different name for the character following complaints about this.
The Flash: The series features a speedster who took the name Savitar, because somebody skimmed the bit in Savitr's Wikipedia page which says "he is lord of that which is mobile and is stationary", and concluded this solar deity was the "god of speed". More egregious, however, because unlike the TV Savitar, the comics version is implied to actually be Hindu.
The Incredible Hercules: The setting's versions Ares and Achilles both mention fighting side by side at Troy. In The Iliad Ares was in the Trojan camp.
The Sandman (1989): In one issue, Loki is making a Badass Boast, and he references his children but claims that Fenrir is called "Sun-Eater". In Norse myth, Fenrir is destined to kill Odin at Ragnarok. His son Skoll is the one that eats the sun (his other son, Hati, eats the moon).
Wolverine: In Wolverine (1988), the Shiva robots quote that they are Shiva the destroyer, and are so named after Shiva in Hindu Mythology, however, Shiva is not simply the Hindu god of destruction, as destruction refers to the aspect of clearing the way for new growth, or a new cycle.

Fan Works

Aeon Natum Engel: Gendo lampshades the reputation of the Necronomicon as instantly driving the reader insane when it actually doesn't do that. Reading between the lines may cause this though.
Twilight Sparkle's Majesty lampshades the misuse of the term "alicorn" in the cartoon as "winged unicorn" instead of its original meaning as the name a unicorn's horn. When Twilight, a winged unicorn from Friendship is Magic, travels back in time to meet Majesty, a unicorn from the G1 comics, she identifies herself as an alicorn; Majesty, who lived before winged-unicorn alicorns existed, replies that an alicorn is a unicorn horn, not a type of being.
"Oh," Twilight Sparkle smiled, and the superior little grin made Majesty's teeth grit, "we're called alicorns."
"Actually," Majesty corrected her, "this is called an alicorn." And she tapped her horn to demonstrate.
"No, that's a horn."
"Of course it is. But rhinos have horns, and narwhals have horns; when a unicorn has a horn, it is called an alicorn."
"But that's what I am."
"No, that's what you have."
Rose Petals from a Vampire, a The Vampire Chronicles fanfic, introduces an ancient Egyptian male vampire love interest. Since Enkil and Akasha in the books were identified with Osiris and Isis, the author thought it would be a good idea to name said vampire after another Egyptian deity, Nephthys. Good idea, except that Nephthys is a goddess. It's not more wrong than identifying Enkil with an Egyptian god, which is right for the specific canon, but Enkil's just another spelling for a Babylonian god.
Harmless: Ammit is portayed as a powerful male ghost when in Egyptian Mythology she was a female demon who devoured the hearts of the unworthy dead. This is essentially Artistic License and is immediately lampshaded when they look up the name. It is stated the Egyptians based their stories upon the ghost and simply got some details wrong.
Harry Potter and the Rune Stone Path: The Ancient Runes professor Bathsheda Babbling acquired the nickname "Shiva" due to friends commenting that she was a "goddess of destruction" after a couple of dangerous experiments. Parvati Patil later points out that Shiva happens to be quite male and since she's named after his second wife, she ought to know.
The Dragon and the Bow: Granted, Loki is a spirit, not a god, in this fic, but he and his brother Thor take numerous liberties with authentic myths, Viking or otherwise. For example:
- Loki's identified as the "Father Of Dragons" among the villagers of Berk. Loki did not father any dragons in the original myths- his son Jormungand was a sea serpent, not a dragon- and the only connection he has with them is being partially responsible for cursing Fafnir.
- Thor was never his brother in the myths, only in the Marvel Comics.
- In the case of Thor himself, his appearance is based on the Marvel Comics version (blonde, clean-shaven) as opposed to the original Norse version (Manly Facial Hair, Fiery Redhead).
- Thor's Japanese identity, Raiden, is based more on the Mortal Kombat character of the same name (human in appearance with a hat). The original Raiden of Japanese Mythology was a heavyset Gonk who looked more like an Oni than human.
Jackie Chan Adventures: Olympian Journey addresses the canonical example listed below. The reason that the Monkey King seen in the canon show is so different from the actual Sun Wukong from Journey to the West is that he's actually the Six-Eared Macaque, having gotten Eris to help him craft a spell to usurp the Monkey King's identity. Eris ends up breaking said spell when he grabs the trident with Poseidon's essence.
Kamikakushi: Tobirama reads both The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and accounts of Kaguya it was based on. The truth is quite harsher than the folk story version.
The Banshee of Dismal Downs!: Used In-Universe when Annie, Mrs. Beakley's daughter, informs Donald and Della that a banshee is a fairy rather than a ghost as the twins first assume. In a twist, part of The Reveal is that the legendary banshee actually is a ghost.
A Man of Iron: The people of Westeros missed the mark a few times with the Seven (the Asgardians); they got Odin and Frigga close enough, but they gave Balder Mjölnir and Heimdell's beard, gave Thor a sword, and put Sif in the role of the Maiden. The only ones who have any real inkling of what Thor is like are the Ironborn, who fear him as a malicious Storm God who takes delight in killing and torturing followers of the Drowned God (who is himself a victim of this, as the Ironborn made him to be a Social Darwinist pirate god when he's really a laid back party animal who got his nickname after Sif rebuffed his drunken flirting by throwing him into a pond).
Scarlet Lady: Played for Laughs. Alix is quick to correct her brother whenever he gets something wrong about Egyptian mythology. Later, she manages to identify him as the akumatized villain when he invokes Thoth, the god of writing and magic, for time powers.
There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: Discussed. While All Myths Are True is the case in this setting, Nico notes that many of the Greek myths that actually happened have been warped over time since Ancient Greece, like a 2000+ years game of Telephone. He gets a taste of what mortals who find out that the Olympians are real must feel like when Danny tells him that Pandora is a native Ghost Zone entity who was never human, and that the Box is really a container for dangerous, feral ghosts instead of the source of all of humanity's evils.
Under the Northern Lights: Within the story. The Equestrian comic book hero Sampo the Warrior-Prince is based on the mythical Tarandroland hero Sampo. Based very loosely it seems — among other things, the comic has him be the son of the reindeer king while the sorcerer Wiglek the Wicked is his uncle, while in reality it was the other way around. (The comic spoofed is rather obviously The Mighty Thor.)

Films — Animated

Hercules has its own page for this.
How to Train Your Dragon is based on the admittedly common misconception that dragons are typical to Nordic myths. The same franchise's Christmas Special also makes up a winter holiday, even though Jôl (winter solstice) was already one of the Vikings' most significant holidays before it was replaced by Christmas.
Moana: An In-Universe example. The narration told by Moana's grandmother implies that Te Kā came into existence after Te Fiti's heart was stolen. As it turns out, Te Fiti is the same being as Te Kā. Furthermore, the legend says that Maui stole the heart so he could have the power of creation to himself, when the truth is that he wanted to help the humans by giving them that power.
The Nightmare Before Christmas: When Jack comes across the trees with the doors to the different holidays, one of the doors has a four-leaved clover/shamrock, presumably to represent St. Patrick's Day. However, St. Patrick's symbol is a three-leaved shamrock. This may seem pedantic, but the whole reason it's the symbol of St. Patrick is because there were three leaves on it - he supposedly used the three leaves to illustrate the Holy Trinity.
Wonder Woman (2009): As per usual with Wonder Woman stories the Greek Mythology is mostly In Name Only, but some of these changes are new to the film:
- Hades seems to be reviled and looks and behaves more like an overweight Bacchus than the impartial ruler of the underworld.
- The Amazons of myth were called the Daughters of Ares due to his favor of them, their warlike nature and the fact that he acted as consort to one of their queens. Hippolyta was his actual daughter with said queen and, like all his children, under his fierce protection should she ask for it. She was not someone he'd have attacked and raped as in the film, especially since Ares is one of the few in the Greek pantheon who doesn't have any famous tales of non-consensual relationships and is the only one who has done anything to prevent a rape, namely killing one of Posideon's sons for trying to rape one of Ares' daughters.
- While Zeus in the film actually saved Ares in mythology he hated Ares and laughed him off whenever he tried to ask for help and considered him an embarrassment and tattle-tale.
- Once again the Amazons, the mythological inventors of pants, don't seem to own or wear a single pair of pants.
Son of the White Horse has some leeway since it's not an adaptation, more of a mixture of dozens of related old European folk tales and creation myths, with nods to Nordic and Asian legends. It works on a surface level, especially since in-depth analyses of its source material are rather rare and obscure. But certain folklorists, including one of the film's own consultants, say its faults lie in its astrological and cosmological symbolism: taking one character's role from one take on the base story, another one's from a different version, completely reinventing or merging different characters but keeping some of their original traits the same, resulting in a hodgepodge of contradicting sublime symbolism.

Films — Live-Action

The Mask:
- The movie refers to Loki as the Norse "god of darkness". Loki is not a god of darkness; the closest thing to a god of darkness in Norse Mythology is Nótt, the personification of the night. Loki, is both a Jotun (the Norse giants) and a god, being listed as one of the Aesir in the Gylfaginning. He is one of mythology's Trickster Gods -like Ipkiss' Mask. He plays an incredibly crucial role in the myths -granted, a lot of problems he solved, he caused.
- In Son of the Mask, Loki is Odin's son (in the Norse myths, he's actually a Jotun fostered by the Aesir, of which Odin is the foremost) and sometimes Odin's blood brother. And the creators apparently didn't even bother to research the series' own "mythology", presenting Loki and the Mask as separate entities, while the original film established that Loki was trapped within the Mask.
Clash of the Titans (the original):
- The film makes so much hash of its source material that an exhaustive catalog of the errors would be a challenge. Considering that the errors begin, in a way, with the title of the film, this should not be too surprising: the film considers a Titan to be just about any large, disagreeable monster such as the Kraken (which is Scandinavian, anyway; the creature depicted by the movie is actually supposed to be Cetus) or Medusa, while in Greek mythology the Titans were an early group of immortals before the Greek gods (who overthrew them). The main storyline follows the main events of the Perseus myth, but also muddles together unrelated stories, such as Pegasus, as well as nonsensical elements that appear nowhere in any of the cobbled-together myths, such as a mechanical owl.
- The inclusion of Pegasus is especially ironic given that that the original winged horse sprang from Medusa's remains.
- Ray Harryhausen even acknowledged the fact that the Kraken never appeared in Greek mythology. Cetus, the sea monster that Perseus killed in the myth, was more akin to a sea dragon. Ray simply didn't want to create another dragon, so he decided to use the Kraken, a far more unique menace. It was purely an aesthetic decision, although it doesn't at all resemble a squid or octopus like the mythological Kraken.
The Remake Clash of the Titans keeps most of the original's creative interpretations of classical myth and adds a few more of its own.
- Hades as the evil "God of Hell," who is trying to (you guessed it) Take Over the World.
- Not to mention that Medusa's lair is apparently in/near the Underworld, Perseus hated all the gods, he ends up with the wrong girl, and Pegasus isn't the unique child of a very unique mother, but rather a name for winged horses in general.
Syfy's original monster movies based on mythological creatures might do anything. Their depiction of Cerberus is especially bad, what with it guarding a Hun weapon in Romania instead of the gates of a Greek underworld, and everything...
Kali:
- Almost any Western movie ever, when it comes to Kali, the Hindu Goddess of death, destruction and disease, but also of mercy and forgiveness and good health. More on her on That Other Wiki. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? Check. Stranglers of Bombay? Check. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (animated Kali by Ray Harryhausen)... Check. Probably the earliest example in film would be Gunga Din, a direct inspiration for at least some of the aforementioned. Shiva raises more confusion, maybe because theoretically he's the most capable of destruction, but very rarely cares to blast anything, when compared with other deities.
- To oversimplify the issue, Durga fought demons so strong she has to be reborn in the form specifically prepared for this task, while Kali slaughtered lesser foes. Kali is also a mother figure — which makes her sort of "universal Mama Bear," but then it's only to be expected that she can be utterly horrifying and widely admired.
- Mostly, these confusions arose because Hinduism itself (as most Europeans know it) is a result of several transformations. First was Vedanta introduced in the 8th century AD, last was the "Hindu Reformation" of the 19th to early 20th centuries. For one of the local interpretations, there's a guy who grew up there and spoke their language and his Shiv and the Grasshopper, where neither Shiv nor Parbati are portrayed as anything anywhere near "gods of destruction," but "Shiva the Preserver" was invoked. BTW, he's blue-necked because he drank primal poison capable of wiping out the rest of the universe. But if you see Trimurti as a personification of Guna (3 flavors of prime driving force), it makes sense that the face of Tamas is a pinnacle of the body's force ("food giver," Great Ascetic, creator of dance) and raw force as such (ultimately not-to-be-trifled-with but not very actively dangerous power, both "Destroyer" and "Preserver" depending on the situation)... and, well, have such an outstanding "significant other."
- The villains in the Temple of Doom were Thugee (although highly distorted ones, no Thug would be stupid enough to act openly), and at least some of the real members of the group claimed to worship Kali as death. The problem is, the movie treats this as being the correct and only interpretation of Kali, who is actively evil and makes people Brainwashed and Crazy with her blood.
- For further mythtaken-ness, The Temple of Doom has Shiva as the one true God of Hinduism and Kali as his enemy.
- What may confuse people more is that there is an entirely different figure in Hindu mythology named Kali, who actually is evil. It doesn't help that Indian civilization goes back a really long way, and people there commonly name their kids after gods, and they have quite a lot of kids and quite a lot of gods.
- The killer Kali statue from Golden Voyage of Sinbad may be an in-character example, as the evil wizard who controlled it showed few signs of being Hindu, although he did recognize what goddess the statue represented. Animating the thing was just a convenient way for him to impress the local savages and create a many-sword-wielding Mook. The green-painted savages who worshiped the statue weren't intended to be typical of Kali-worshipers either; they're just a Stone Age tribe that'd moved into the ruins and adopted the statue as a deity because it looked impressive.
Indiana Jones:
- The plot-driver in Raiders of the Lost Ark is that The Ark of the Covenant is some sort of magical weapon, and would make its owner invincible. In fact, one instance in 1 Samuel where the Israelites tried to use it as a weapon merely caused the Ark to get very angry at their disrespect and let them lose the battle. Given the Ark simply wiped out the Nazis who opened it, though, perhaps the part of retaliating against its owners was indeed noted.
- In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the Sankara stones are depicted as rare artifacts, and are referred to as The Sankara Stones. In the film, there are only five. But these stones are lingams, which can be any stone dedicated to Shiva or meant to represent Shiva.
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:
  - The Holy Grail. First of all, the term "Holy Grail" originally referred to an object, not clearly defined, probably a bowl, but definitely not a cup, that was wholly (no pun intended) fictional, purely a literary device. At some point, it somehow became conflated with the Holy Chalice, the cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper, which was offhandedly mentioned in the bible, but as nothing more or less than what it was: a cup. The Christian religion has no significant tradition regarding the Holy Chalice, merely saying that it is Holy by virtue of the fact that Christ handled it, so in the same sense that Christ's sandals could be called "The Holy Sandals".
  - The "Holy Grail as granter of eternal life" plot is not based on the Bible or later Christian tradition either. The writers came with it after toying with the idea of having Indy find the Holy Grail in the Action Prologue and then go to look for some version of the Fountain of Youth in the movie proper. Somebody suggested mixing the two, and the rest is (movie) history.
- In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, both Greeks and Romans imagined dragons as giant, constricting, venomous snakes - and not a fiery, flying beast.
In the Godzilla films, King Ghidorah is partly based off of Orochi. And, in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!, he's stated to be a juvenile Orochi that has been purified (somehow) and now protects Japan from evil. However, Ghidorah has only three heads whereas Orochi has eight. The film explains that Ghidorah hasn't matured enough to grow all of his heads back. Biollante is said to be named after a Norse nature spirit; while there are numerous Norse nature deities, none of them are called Biollante (the name was made up for the monster). Averted with Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla which actually does a fairly accurate representation of the Okinawa mythologies of the Shisa in regards with the daikaiju King Caesar.
Gods of Egypt: Even at his most unflattering and vilified stage during the long, long history of ancient Egypt, Set was still depicted as opposing Apophis. He still helped Ra fight him every night and would certainly not "unleash him" like in the movie.
Evil Bodhisattva in Big Trouble in Little China. Yipes. Not all Bodhisattvas are very nice, though evil is a pretty strong stretch.
Mission: Impossible II: Anthony Hopkins's character mentions that Spaniards honor the Saints during the Holy Week of Seville by burning their effigies. He's probably confused with the Fallas of Valencia, a different city where effigies of celebrities and politicians are burned — nothing to do with religion. This character is shown to be a jerk, but he should know the name of the city he's visiting, and people were in fact burning some effigies in the streets of Seville for some reasons we Spaniards cannot even imagine.
Another confusion happens in a second Tom Cruise movie, Knight and Day (which at least filmed a couple of scenes in Seville). Nope, San Fermín is not the national holiday of Spain or something like that. It's a local holiday in Pamplona only.
The Mummy Trilogy:
- The first film has Imhotep being terrified of cats, due to the claim that they are the guardians of the underworld. The Duat (underworld) in the actual myths was guarded by monstrous serpents, and someone in Imhotep's position, having assisting in the murder of the Pharaoh, the living incarnation of the sun god Ra, was guilty of the single worst crime imaginable, and there was a punishment reserved specifically for people who had committed this particularly horrid type of blasphemy: to be tied with one's arms behind one's back in the underworld in a position designed to cause terrible pain while having a multi-headed serpent eternally breathe fire into your face.
- Generally, the earthly punishment for Imhotep's crimes would not be immortality and mummification in ancient Egypt. Part of the belief behind the ancient Egyptian afterlife was that your name and physical body needed be preserved as well. So greatest punishment to them was to be forgotten and your body destroyed. If you did make to the afterlife, you faced the judgement aka the famous heart-weighing picture with that weird animal ready to eat your soul if the scale tipped against the feather of Maat.
- "The Book of the Dead" is not a physical book; it's a collection of death-related texts from tomb walls and coffins (and it's really called "The Book of Coming Forth By Day"). Plus, even if it were a single artifact, it wouldn't have been the codex-style "book" seen in the film, as that format wasn't used till the late Roman Empire.
- The Mummy Returns has Anubis as a "dark god". To make it even worse, someone was described as selling his soul to Anubis. Anubis carries all the souls of the dead to the underworld, but he isn't in possession of those souls, nor is there any equivalent of hell in the Egyptian afterlife (undeserving souls are simply fed to a monster; yes, it sounds awful, but think about this: it's not eternal).
The Mummy (2017) carries on this grand tradition. It makes sure that the Satan analogue is Set rather than Anubis, which is better but not good. Set was really more a god of the deserts and chaos than, as the film describes him, a god of the dead. Also, Set is a bit like Loki in that he was portrayed more as mischievous in early myths, only crossing over to "evil" after he became associated with certain foreign tribes known for perennially invading Egypt.
Xanadu has Hera and Zeus claim that, as gods, they are above emotions. Yes, the god who would hit anything with a vagina (and Ganymede) and the goddess whose vengeance for being cuckolded would make Lorena Bobbitt cringe claim to be emotionless.
Name a Mesoamerican god. Quetzalcoatl. Name that only one thing you know about Mesoamerican religions. They practiced Human Sacrifice. So that's it! You'll place the climax of your movie on a scene featuring a human sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl! Except that's just wrong. Quetzalcoatl did not demand human sacrifice. He allegedly disliked it, and was "fed" on birds and butterflies only. Better candidates for your classic Religion of Evil scene would be the god of war Huitzilopochtli or the god of water, Tlaloc. A lot of movies like Apocalypto and other media botch this (notice Apocalypto takes place in Mayan lands, and Quetzalcoatl is thus referenced by his Mayan name, Kukulkan). More than that, Aztec priests took the names of their gods, and one named Quetzalcoatl tried to end the human sacrifice. He was executed as a heretic for this, naturally. Oddly enough, authentic depictions of Quetzalcoatl devouring humans have indeed been discovered, some of them rather early. No way of knowing whether such depictions were revisionist attempts to bring ole' Quetzal more in line with the rest of the team, or whether the gentle, tortilla-eating version of Quetzalcoatl was invented by Aztec subjects who didn't actually LIKE being sacrificed.
The Exorcist: Admirably, instead of choosing a pagan god to turn into a demon, they used an actual evil spirit from Mesopotamian mythology as the one who possesses Regan. However, Pazuzu was the exact wrong choice, since out of all Mesopotamian demons, he's the only one known to protect children (mostly against his wife, Lamashtu, who would have been a more appropriate choice). It's possible, of course, that this would have been deliberate on the part of the author, if he wished to tap into the common belief among some Christians that the various pagan deities might actually have existed, but were actually demonic deceivers. In that case, the 'protects children' itself would have been a deceit.
Dogma features muses, and an angel named Loki, but since in the Dogma-verse, humans can imagine anything about cosmology and it becomes true...
Immortals takes a lot of liberties with Greek mythology.
- Mixing up Heracles with Hephaestus, among so many other things.
- The movie tries to make Zeus out to be NICE GUY (well, he was a bit of a Jerkass, but still nowhere near the original).
- The minotaur being a guy with a wire-mesh bull mask instead of a half-human/half-bull, Theseus being a mortal instead the son of Poseidon, Hyperion being a evil king instead of the Titan of Light, the complete invention of the Epirus Bow.
- The Titans are the losers in a war against those who would become known as gods instead of the gods' parents and grandparents. Tartarus is also now a mountain that imprisons them.
In Stargate, the symbol they keep referring to as "The Eye of Ra" is actually "The Eye of Horus" and is also known as the "Wedjet".
There's a brief but oft-quoted speech in the inspirational sports movie Remember the Titans where the coach of the titular football team encourages his players to aspire to be like their mythical namesakes, who were "greater even than the gods". He apparently forgot the part about the Titans being the fallen predecessors of the Gods. And the part where the leader of the Titans, Kronos, was defeated and imprisoned by his son after trying to cannibalize his own children.
The story of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Lightning Thief centers around a summer solstice deadline, but Persephone is shown living in the underworld with Hades—something that's supposed to happen during the fall and winter months. What makes it stand out more is that she does acknowledge that she gets time away from Hades... though exactly when that is never expanded on. Part of why this is especially aggravating is because in the book the movie claims to be based on this problem doesn't exist. Percy takes notice that Persephone's throne in the underworld is empty.
- Also the movie adds Everybody Hates Hades where in the books that trope is subverted, Hades may not be the friendliest dude, and can be kind of harsh, but fair and generally true to his word. In the original mythology Hades was actually the nicest god in the entire pantheon apart from Hestia.
- Not only that but the movie mentions that not only does Persephone hate Hades, but she has so many affairs that she had to come up with a way to get her lovers out without Hades finding out. Neither Hades nor Persephone ever had an affair in the original mythology (The story of Adonis actually features her as a mother figure rather than a lover, and Minthe and Leuce didn't exist in Greek Mythology all three stories are also Roman inventions) but Persephone is occasionally mentioned to prefer the company of Hades over that of her own mother.
The Wendigo is identified as a Comanche myth in The Lone Ranger, but it is actually Algonquian, who were prominent in what is now the northern US and Canada, and the Atlantic coast - it's indicative of long winters and desperation.
Wonder Woman (2017): The film presents a very altered version of Greek myth, which is usual for WW though the film took some liberties that are not common for WW. Some of the most notable departures, which mostly concern the Olympian pantheon, include:
- Amazons in Greek myth are not peaceful enemies of Ares nor daughters of Zeus. They are warlike and barbaric daughters of Ares.
- Zeus was not a creator-god.
- Ares did not kill all the other Greek gods. Zeus was mightier than all the other Greek gods combined, and Ares was a particularly ill-favored god among the Greeks, causing him to often get embarrassed or defeated in their myths. In fact, the story given in the movie, Ares killing his father and the other divine predecessors to make way for a new pantheon is a lot more like Zeus' own rise to power against the Titans.
- Ares was also one of two gods of war, the other being Athena. For the Greeks, Ares represented physical strength, valour, anger, and violence, far from the scheming planner of the film, though Ares taking on the scheming bits of Mars is common in Wonder Woman tales.
- Humankind was created by Prometheus, who later tricked Zeus into accepting bones and fat from animal sacrifice so that humans would be able to keep the meat, and stole fire from Zeus on humankind's behalf. Zeus was actually behind the plan to release evil upon humankind with the whole Pandora thing, rather than being the benevolent father-creator god described by Hippolyta.
The eponymous creature in The Gorgon is identified as Megaera, one of the sisters of Medusa. The film takes liberties about the myth in this regard, since Medusa's sisters are actually called Stheno and Euryale in the Classical Mythology, and Megaera is the name of one of the three Furies.
John Wick: While the mythical Baba Yaga was indeed depicted as a villain and occasional child-snatcher in folklore, it's because she preys upon the overly-curious, who stray from their homes into her domain. In modern times, she is almost always portrayed as a wise and strictly neutral or even helpful character, who might hinder or assist the protagonist of a given tale. The screenwriters seem to have confused Baba Yaga with a similarly-named entity known as Babay, or babayka, who are primarily known for snooping around homes to lure and kidnap children who don't go to sleep when they're told to. If anything, the babay seems closer in description to the boogeyman than Baba Yaga does. Ironically, one antagonist that Baba Yaga often helps heroes deal with is a figure whose description fits John Wick almost perfectly, Koschei the Deathless.
The first The Twilight Saga movie mentions a creature from Native American mythology called Apotamkin, claiming it is a type of vampire... except it is actually described as a gigantic, monstrous sea serpent with long red hair that is said to live in Passamaquoddy Bay and eats anyone who wanders close to its domain, partcularly unsupervised children.
Kazaam: A major plot point is Kazaam's desire to become a djinn, which he describes as a genie that's been freed from servitude (which he achieves in the ending). Unfortunately, "djinn" is either simply the plural of genie, or just another term for genie which can be used interchangeably; either way there is absolutely NO distinction between the two words.

Literature

Played with in Chasing Shadows, where after the extent of Holly's psychosis is revealed, Savitri and her mom comment on how Kortha is nothing like the benevolent Yama.
In The Chronicles of Prydain, the characters have names from Welsh mythology, and like other Hijacked by Jesus examples, the name of the god of death is given to a Satanic character. Comparatively, the honorable Aragorn is named Gwydion, who was actually more like Loki/Hermes in the mythology. At least Lloyd Alexander admits he's playing fast and loose with the Welsh mythological canon. To quote him: "Prydain is not Wales—not entirely, at least. The inspiration for it comes from that magnificent land and its legends; but, essentially, Prydain is a country existing only in the imagination."
Michael Chabon's novel Summerland takes place in a world that cheerily mashes together Native American and Norse mythology. This leads to the reveal, utterly brain-breaking if you know your mythology, that Coyote Changer is also Loki and the Devil. Seriously. (And for its next trick, the rules of the Universe are based on those of baseball).
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's Hell Screen mentions "the inferno of Guren (Padma) and Daiguren (Mahāpadma) as though drowning even mountains of spears and forests of swords", even though these hell levels are cold.
Life of Pi: It’s offhandedly mentioned that a guy visiting the zoo tried to kill some Mouse Deer with the intent of punishing "Evil Ravana" who took the form of a deer when kidnapping Sita in the Ramayana, when it was actually another rakshasa named Mareecha who did that, not Ravana himself.
In Immanuel Velikovsky's supposedly nonfiction book Worlds in Collision, he put forth a pseudoscience explanation for various cataclysms based on the idea that Venus was the Roman version of the Greek Athena. In fact Venus is the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite, a fact that even bad pop song writers should be able to tell you.
Early in his writing career, Robert E. Howard realized he was horrible at making up names. So the Conan the Cimmerian stories are liberally sprinkled with historical and mythical names for characters and places that don't necessarily relate to the narrative context. In some cases (particularly with the Aesir and the Vanir tribes) that what we know of ancient mythology is actually half-remembered tales of real events from the Hyborean Age. So in the Conan universe, we're all guilty of this trope.
Justified in Fred Saberhagen's Books of Swords trilogy, as, while Vulcan is, as pointed out in the essay at the end of the first book, more like a Norse Jotun in personality than the Vulcan of Greco-Roman myth, since it is ultimately revealed that the so-called "gods" are really just the product of human dreams, and presumably myths can change in thousands of years.
Herman Melville betrayed his (or his character's) ignorance of Greek mythology when, in Moby-Dick, he had Captain Ahab compare the ship's blacksmith to Prometheus. It Makes Sense in Context (sort of) - and also, a straight comparison of a blacksmith to Hephaestus was something of a Dead Horse Trope at the time he was writing the novel. "Chapter 108: Ahab and the Carpenter: The Deck—First Night Watch":
What's Prometheus about there? —the blacksmith, I mean —what's he about? He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now. Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there! Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work. Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable.
Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree features a downright painful mangling of mythology. It equates Osiris with Ra, as well as equating Osiris' resurrection with both the cycle of day and night and the changing of the seasons.
One can forgive Dante's merging of Greek and Christian takes of the afterlife and mythology in The Divine Comedy as creative liberty, but one cannot forgive him for his use of the centaurs in the outer ring of the seventh circle of Hell, for one distinct reason: he put Chiron, a Defector from Decadence and revered healer and sage, as the leader of the centaurs driving the damned back into the boiling blood river, and put Nessus, known for raping Hercules' second wife and tricking her into poisoning Hercules to death, as the one who helps Dante and Virgil across the river. Apparently, all Dante ever knew about them was that they were both centaurs and Nessus carried someone across a river one time.
- He also portrayed Cacus as a centaur and Geryon as a dragon, despite both of them being humanoid giants in the original mythology.
You can blame Lafcadio Hearn for the fact that any Westerner who's heard of the mujina probably has it confused with the noppera-bō (or "faceless ghost"), and for mislabeling the nukekubi as rokuro-kubi.
Bridget Wood's Celtic fantasy novels. But hey, it replaces all semblance of plot with bestiality and gory rape, so that's all right then.
The Twilight Saga: In Twilight, Meyer describes varacolaci as being "a powerful undead being who could appear as a beautiful, pale-skinned human", while they are more famously known as wolf demons that cause solar and lunar eclipses by swallowing the sun and moon respectively. They also appear as dry pale-skinned humans, not beautiful. In Breaking Dawn and Midnight Sun, Meyer cites the incubus and succubus as vampires who are known in mythology as being promiscuous and seduced women and men, respectively. Both of them were demons who were believed to be the cause of nightmares and wet dreams. Also in Breaking Dawn, the cleaning lady at Bella and Edward's honeymoon site believes that Edward is a "libishomen", described as "a blood-drinking demon who preys exclusively on beautiful women". In reality, the lobisomem (the real name of the "libishomen" in Brazilian Folklore) is the Iberic version of the werewolves, and while they do drink blood in oral tradition, they are never said to target beautiful women in any way, at the very most pregnant women. One of those is actually justified; Edward implied that myths about incubi were made up by humans based on vampires like him. The other cases are valid, though, and there was also a mention of 'actual' werewolves that operate on 'full moon and silver bullets' logic. The silver bullets are more of a Hollywood concept.
Related to the above, the fandom of Dracula, rather than the author, are widely guilty of this. Adaptations have flanderized sunlight into vampire kryptonite, but Mythology Marches On, and Stoker's vampires are merely weaker in sunlight. The original Dracula is also destroyed by a knife through the heart rather than a stake. Sharp steel or iron objects like needles or knives are effective vampire kryptonite in Slavic mythology, yet adaptations, sequels, and even "scholarly" annotated versions of the novel jump on the lack of a wooden stake as proof that Dracula is Not Quite Dead.
The characters of Atlas Shrugged use the idea of Atlas holding up the celestial sphere as a model of great men being constrained by the demands of lesser beings. If Atlas ever got tired of the weight, all he'd have to do is shrug it off and it'd be the end for them, right? Well, in the original myth, Atlas was holding up the sky, and he was doing so at the command of the gods, as punishment for siding with the Titans in the Titanomachy. For added giggles, this had the side effect of preventing Gaia from doing the nasty with Ouranos and creating more problems for the gods. Additionally, shrugging off the weight without someone else to hold it for him (like Heracles in one of the myths) would only result in Atlas and everyone getting the sky dropped on them. Ironically enough attempting to "Go Galt" and separate yourself from the rest of society in real life can have similar messy consequences since many of those other beings are responsible for ensuring that "great men" have nice things (Who Cleans Galt's John?). In any event, Atlas was eventually turned to stone by Perseus anyway, making the shrugging a moot point.
Harry Potter novels tend to attach the names of mythological creatures to beings unrelated to them. For example, "boggarts" are small, dwarf-like creatures, not shapeshifters. An In-Universe example occurs when Snape says that a Kappa is a Mongolian beast, not Japanese, in an offhand comment, correcting a student in one book. The side book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them states that Kappas are actually Japanese (as in real life), with a note from Harry in the margin stating "Snape hasn't read this book either".
In Hush, Hush, the characters constantly turn to the Book of Enoch as a reference for the rules of fallen angels. This is reinforced by the fact that the only fallen angels we see are ones who procreated with humans to create the Nephilim (as recorded in the Book of Enoch). According to the book though, the angels did not fall because of lust for human women, but because they were supposed to watch over the Garden of Eden and instead tempted Eve with the apple so that they could lay claim to Earth. We later find out that the fallen angels get shots at both becoming a guardian angel (saving a human life) or becoming a human (killing a Nephilim), the latter situation allegedly having been recorded in the Book of Enoch. There is no such story there, and in fact the Book makes it very clear that the fallen angels have absolutely no chance of redemption at all.
In-Universe in The Satyricon: Trimalchio narrates a skit about the Trojan War to his dinner guests and completely butchers the mythology. This was a satire of nouveau riche merchants, whereas proper aristocratic Romans would've received an education in Greek literature and philosophy.
Lampshaded and deconstructed in Simon Green's "Razor Eddie's Big Night Out", in which H. P. Lovecraft's fish-demon conception of the god Dagon has become so well-known in pop culture that the original Dagon, a human-looking, inoffensive agricultural deity, is being pushed out of the Street of the Gods as a result. Luckily for the original, Razor Eddie is a friend of his, and he's not fond of poseurs....
In the short story "The All Ireland Champion Versus the Nye Add", found in The Ribbajack, champion fisherman Roddy Mooney sets his sights on catching a Nye Add, which, according to him, is half woman and half fish. Said Nye Add reveals to the narrator at the end of the story that she is actually a kelpie. The problem is that Nye Adds (naiads) are not interchangeable with mermaids; they look exactly like human women and do not have fish tails; neither do real kelpies for that matter, which are water horses from Celtic mythology that lure children onto their backs to drown and eat them. Not to mention that naiads are from Greek, not Irish, mythology.
Piers Anthony had used "Alicorn" to refer to a Winged Unicorn — Alicorn is actually the substance a unicorn horn is made out of.
In The House of Night, Sister Mary Angela, the Head Nun of the Benedictine Abbey, calls Kalona a Nephilim. A Catholic Nun would know better than that, and that the Raven Mockers, which are beings that are part-Immortal/part-Human, are in fact Nephilim. Kalona even named his eldest son after a type of Nephilim.
In The Gospel of Loki, Joanne Harris offers her own spin on Norse Mythology. Harris clearly knows her source material very well, and sticks very closely to the recorded mythology. However, she does occasionally change things:
- The idea that reversing or flipping a rune changes its meaning stems from the late 18th century Armenian Futhark runes, not the historical Germanic/Scandinavian runes.
- The "bastard" rune on Maddie's hand is supposed to be the Aesc/Aesk ("ash tree") rune; however, the rune illustrated in-story is not Aesc, but Ós (the historical Anglo-Saxon "god" rune). The real-life Aesc/Aesk rune is identical in appearance to the Elder Futhark Ansuz rune. (Long story short, the "broken" Ós rune took Ansuz's place as the "god" rune in Anglo-Saxon lore, while Ansuz was renamed Aesc/Aesk and was moved further down the aett list.)
- Dagaz, the rune of "day" is somehow associated with the thunderbolt, when it is actually the rune of transformations and new beginnings.
- Iar is affiliated with the world serpent (its stanza mentions rivers while the name "Iar" is Old English for eel, a common kenning for the World Serpent) and boundaries, not industry and building.
- Berkana is the rune of the birch tree and nurturing/fertility, not revelation. Kaen, on the other hand, is the rune of insight and revelation as well as creative fire (it is the "torch" rune), not wildfire or Loki.
- Thurisaz is not the rune of victory: that title belongs to the Tiwaz/Tyr rune. Historically, Thurisaz is the rune of destruction, misery, and the Jötnar, and was often used to curse on one's enemies. Its association with Thor started with the Armenian runes, stemming mainly from it being vaguely-hammer-shaped, and it being the first letter of Thor's name.
- Sleipnir is a strawberry roan, even though Gylfaginning describes him as grey.
- Odin's son Vidar has been left out of the book, but his epithet "The Silent God" is ironically applied to Odin's brother Honir. Vidar was also supposed to kill Fenrir, but in the book Thor does it.
Domina: In-universe. Since all the cultures are real gangs based on myths, things get weird pretty quickly. The first vampire was Striga (which is a Romanian word that can mean a vampire, but is more commonly a type of witch), the giants of Niflheim and Muspelheim are on friendly terms (in Norse mythology they spent nearly as much time killing each other as the gods), trolls are color-coded giants with a Healing Factor (though no one can agree on what trolls should be anyway), and the angels have six Names after the archangels—Gabriel, Jegudiel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, and Lucifer (Lucifer was a title, the correct name would be Samael). Some of these are lampshaded in the text, but most are ignored, since the cultures have been going on for long enough that the locals remember them far more clearly than ancient myths.
The peryton. This stag-headed, bird-bodied monster that casts a human shadow and consumes human hearts appears in countless fantasy and mythology series, which will tell you it originated from Greek Mythology. The truth? It was an invention of Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges for his book of mythical creatures The Book of Imaginary Beings. His fondness of scholarly humour inspired him to create a "mythical" mythical creature, with another infamous example being the A Bao A Qu, a formless entity which he claimed was from Indian mythology.
The Song of Hiawatha was an epic poem that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow composed by mashing together several Native American legends, myths, and actual historical events into a single narrative. The basic story was about all he got right.
The Saga of the Exiles plays it similarly to the Conan example. Celtic mythology turns out to be the barely-remembered accounts of things that actually happened in the Pliocene epoch involving aliens and time travellers, thus making everyone in the real world fall into this trope.
Incarnations of Immortality: A Hindu Indian prince says that Satan is the equivalent of Shiva. Apparently, Piers Anthony only did the truly minimal amount of research to know that Shiva is the Hindu destroyer deity and didn't probe deep enough to see that he's a heroic figure who mostly destroys evil and slaughters demons, as well as being one of the three aspects of the Hindu supreme trinity. In other words, that's about as far off as claiming Jesus is the equivalent of Satan. A far better comparison could have been made to the demon lord Ravana, Shiva's traditional enemy.
Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda is one of the main sources of Norse Myth. However, Snorri wrote them down in the 13th century just as Europe became obsessed with the Greek myths, and after Christianity had largely replaced the old beliefs. So, to make the legends respectable, he claimed that the Norse Gods were actually the heroes of the Iliad, who came north after the events described by Homer, and, because the Greeks were so great, they were able to convince the locals that they were gods. In one of the most hilarious trees in the Epileptic Forest, he claims that because Thor was sometimes referred to as Asa-Thor ("The ~~Aesir~~Ás, Thor"), that he was clearly Hec-Tor (never mind that Hector dies near the end of the Iliad). Okay, half the countries of Europe were claiming descent from some hero or race of Greek Myth at that time - the Britons claimed to be descended from someone called Brutus who, after the Trojan War, got swept out to sea and ended up in Britain; The Declaration of Arbroath says the Scots were descended from the Scythians (we can only presume because Kenneth MacAlpine played the same "Invite the chieftains to a party, get them drunk, then slaughter them" trick on the Picts that was played on the Scythians in Herodotus: there's very little other mention of the Scythians). So why not claim you're descended from every single Greek hero? He also was under a little pressure to point out that recording pagan myths didn't make him any less of a God-fearing Christian. Texts such as the Lebor Gabala Erenn are essentially the Celtic (mainly Irish) equivalent of the Eddas; and also have a rather incoherent Christian time line tacked on. Interestingly, the author of the Book of Leinster was so afraid of being branded a heretic after listing the Tuatha De Danann that he added the disclaimer "Although the author enumerates them, he does not worship them."
John Gardner's James Bond novel Win, Lose or Die features a new evil organization called BAST. Although M correctly identifies the name as coming from Egyptian Mythology, it is bafflingly misidentified as referring to a fire-breathing, three-headed demon with a snake's body. In fact, Bast (or Bastet) was a benevolent feline goddess who was associated, among other things, with protection and was a noted slayer of evil snake demons.

Live-Action TV

Are You Afraid of the Dark? - "The Tale of Jake and the Leprechaun" contains several when trying to incorporate Irish mythology. While one could normally hand wave it by being a campfire story told by a preteen, Eric says it's specifically based on stories his Irish grandfather told him. The following...
- Eric claims that the Irish call The Fair Folk 'pixies' rather than fairies. Pixies are from British folklore (although there could feasibly be an overlap), and the Irish would call them fairies, or the Irish language name for them Aos Sí.
- Jake is given a potion that turns him into a changeling. Changelings in Celtic mythology are fairy children that get swapped with humans, and aren't something you can turn into via Involuntary Shapeshifting.
- The titular leprechaun is a helpful figure who helps Jake fight the true villain. Leprechauns are more likely to be tricksters in Irish folklore. Sean also wears green, which is of course the colour most associate with Oireland, when that's reserved for leprechauns in groups. A solitary one like him would wear red.
- The biggest one of all is that the actor in Jake's play turns out to be a Banshee. A man being a banshee is impossible, since they're an Always Female species, and the name is an anglicised variant of the Irish beann sí (pronounced the same way) that literally translates as 'fairy woman'. And the Banshee just appears to foretell the death of a family member, rather than trying to turn a human into a changeling.
Stargate SG-1:
- While Stargate was arguably already pushing the "liberal" application of Egyptian mythology too far, the series pushed it even further — and not just Egyptian, but many mythologies all over the world, shoehorning them into the premise of aliens impersonating gods. Of course, within its universe, it's the religions that are memetic mutations of the events that "really" happened, not the other way round.
- Even there it's a little unclear. Sometimes the Goa'uld seemed to be impersonating or taking on the roles of mythological figures that existed before those Goa'uld came to Earth, while other times the Goa'uld seemed to be using their own names and identities which happened to inspire the myths we now know. That might be Depending on the Writer, or since the Goa'uld came to Earth now and then for thousands of years, it might just vary depending on the individual Goa'uld. The Asgard, though, unambiguously are open about their names, identities and goals, and their actions happened to inspire the Norse myths.
- The Asgard used holoprojectors to disguise that they were small and grey, though. SG-1's position on the Goa'uld seems to have shifted over time. It was pretty clearly a case of the Goa'uld being the inspiration for mythology, but characters started quite pointedly saying the Goa'uld assumed the roles of gods. (Presumably someone became uncomfortable with the unfortunate implications for well, every religion in the world).
- In the Season 1 episode "Thor's Hammer", Daniel says that Thor had a hammer called, well, Thor's Hammer. The problem with this is that it was actually named Mjolnir, and is probably the second most famous named weapon in the West (a distant loss to Excalibur).
McMillan & Wife did an episode where Sally is stalked and kidnapped by "Satanists". They figure out who the bad guy is because he makes references to Ancient Egypt — which was, according to the writers, the origin of Satanism. Eventually they learn that the stalker believes Sally to be the incarnation of an Egyptian goddess named Serena. Not only is the Egyptian mythos totally unrelated to Satanism, and "Serena" not an Egyptian goddess, but "Serena" isn't even an Egyptian name! It's related to Selena, which is Greek.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Trope Namer
- The Halloween episode is notorious among certain circles for portraying Janus as a god of chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth; while the "division of self" does fit the idea of people and their costumes becoming one, Janus could better be portrayed as a god of Order, not Chaos, especially in his role as god of portals, doors, and gateways.
- Another episode involved invoking Diana for a spell meant to make someone fall in love, or at least lust, with someone else. Part of her domain was virginity. Of course, this could be why the spell went so horribly wrong.
Supernatural:
- The show started out with urban legends and was very faithful to them. It started doing the same kind of 'square peg into round hole' approach to its monsters-of-the-week as Charmed (ex. brain-eating kitsune) around the same time it started Going Cosmic and incorporating all kinds of mythology, no matter how awkwardly they fit the series.
- One of the cryptids in the show was the Jersey Devil, who looked like a devil. This would have been fine, had not the folkloric Jersey Devil actually looked like a long-necked horse with bat wings.
- One of the most talked-about examples is the episode "Hammer of the Gods", in which all pagan deities are man-eaters. It's vaguely interpreted that gods feast on human flesh when there's little faith left to sustain them... in which case, it's surprising to hear that all of India must have embraced Islam at some point in the history of the Supernatural-verse for it to make any sense that the Hindu gods, who have hundreds of millions of followers in real life, would be in that situation. Word of God says it's actually sacrifices that fuel the pagan gods, not faith, hence why Kali has been reduced to man-eating.
- Archangel Gabriel is strangely The Trickster. In fairness he's pretending to be Loki as a sort of celestial witness protection, but no traditional interpretation of Gabriel puts him anywhere near that personality.
- In the Halloween episode, they introduced a demon named Samhain as the origin of the holiday. That's bad enough, but what's unforgiveable is that they pronounced it phonetically. It wasn't an intentional sign of ignorance either. If Dean had pronounced it wrong it would be one thing, but Sam the research geek and the angels of the Lord also said it phonetically. In case anyone doesn't know, the correct pronounciation is "Sawin". While the idea that the holiday revolves around a demon named Samhain isn't original to the show, it's actually anti-pagan slander invented by Christian fundamentalists.
- The progenitor of all the monster races is named Eve, who is a Biblical character tempted into evil by a monster. The Greeks actually called this monster-mother Echidna. She's probably also based on Lilith, the mother of all demons and Adam's first wife from Jewish mythology, but that name was already used for another character in the show. To be fair, it's the character who names herself "Eve" and she's explicitly not the Biblical Eve, who is mentioned in the final season by Adam.
- In a Season 6 episode, Atropos, one of the three Moirai (Greek goddesses of Fate), says that her two older sisters will come for Castiel and Balthazar if they kill her, warning them that they are more powerful than her. In the original myths, Atropos is actually the eldest sister, and is by far the most feared of the trio, because she decides when humans will die (Clotho decides when humans will be born, while Lachesis decides their course of life).
- A season 8 episode mentions Prometheus as a love interest of the goddess Artemis, when Artemis was, among other things, the goddess of chastity. Of course the relationship between the two was treated as if it was a bit of a scandal so it could've been an intentional change.
- Sometimes the show does this intentionally. It's a Running Gag that there's plenty of lore on unicorns even though hunters are pretty sure they're not real, angels were invincible when they first showed up because (in addition to genuinely being extremely powerful) they had destroyed all information on their weaknesses, and zombies have so much conflicting lore that it's hard to figure out what created a specific zombie or how to kill it.
  Dean: You're telling me there's no lore on how to smoke 'em?
  Sam: No, Dean. I'm telling you there's too much. I mean, there's a hundred different legends on the walking dead, but they all have different methods for killing them. Some say setting them on fire, one said... where is it... right here: feeding their hearts to wild dogs. That's my personal favorite.
Charmed:
- "The Wendigo" characterises the titular creature as more like a werewolf rather than the spirit that possesses people from First Nations mythology (this admittedly was something European colonisers did as well, corresponding it to their own myths about werewolves). Piper is turned into one by being bitten and, while humans could turn into wendigos in folklore, it was usually as a result of excessive greed or cannibalism (or being around them for too long).
- "Look Who's Barking" has the Banshee as something a witch can turn into, rather than a fairy species (the same season had done an episode on fairies). While in Irish folklore, a Banshee's appearance and cries foretold death, this one kills people with her cries and targets those who are already grieving.
- "Siren Song" - there's only one siren, and she's said to be the only one; a mortal woman who was killed for being the accomplice to adultery and then became a demon, rather than a human-bird hybrid (although later myths state that the sirens' bodies were seductive too). While she has the Compelling Voice, it only works on married men, and she has the power to burn the couples to death.
- In "Oh My Goddess!" it's said that the Greek gods were actually mortals the Elders infused with power in order to stop the Titans. This is not a problem in itself — the problem is that Gaea was stated to be one of these mortals, when in mythology she wasn't an Olympian, but the mother of the Titans.
A rare case of Frasier fudging (or at least not being characteristically pedantic about) a classical reference; he refers to a hot day as "like the "Ninth Circle of Hell". This is a reference to Dante's Inferno, where the Ninth Circle is described as being incredibly cold.
In American Horror Story: Coven, the Voodoo deity Papa Legba is a demonic being who snorts coke, Eats Babies, and makes Faustian deals for immortality. In actual religion, he's most often presented as a humble, good-natured old man and keeper of gateways and crossroads, both literal and metaphorical. The show's portrayal of him with a snarky personality and dark fashion sense much more resembles Baron Samedi the death god from the same mythology (but he's not as devil-like as this version of Legba either).
Merlin once used the name "Bastet" (the cat-headed Egyptian god) to describe a girl who changed into a winged panther creature.
That '70s Show: One episode has Midge return home from a feminist group meeting and make reference to "Aphrodite the goddess of war". For those unfamiliar with Greek mythology, Aphrodite was the goddess of love, and lover to the god of war Ares. It should be noted that while Midge is certainly not very bright, the info is implied to have come from a speech she heard that evening rather than her own lack of intelligence, hence her even knowing the name Aphrodite. It's possible the mixup was with Athena, who while generally associated with wisdom is also the goddess of warfare in the Greek mythos.
- This one is accidentally correct - Aphrodite, in her earlier incarnations, was, in fact, a god of war, which makes sense as the similar Primordial Venus gods, and those which influenced her, such as Inanna/Ishtar, were gods of Love and War. Even in later Hellenic mythology, in Laconia, she was worshipped as a warrior goddess, and the Roman Venus had a war aspect as well. Whether the writers knew this is unknowable, but Midge absolutely would not have.
Played for laughs in Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures, when Russell tells a tour group a supposed Aboriginal dreamtime story, that somehow includes a fox (not native to Australia) and a three-eyed snake. His tourists point out the holes in it.
In The Flash (2014) Season 3, the main antagonist, Savitar, Self-Proclaimed God of Speed and Motion (really just future Barry) does this quite a fair bit:
- In the Hindu pantheon, there is a Savitr, but he's a solar god, and has nothing to do with speed or motion. Granted, Earth-1 is a world where metahumans have been around in one form or another since Ancient Egypt, so their myths may have evolved a bit differently.
- Also Savitar claims he sought godhood because God doesn't feel pain; though it is true that he doesn't feel physical pain, the Old Testament does include multiple passages where יהוה, ^note (That's the name of the Abrahamic God) states he's feeling emotional pain, which is what Savitar was referring to. It appears that even though he's been around for thousands of years, he has never once bothered to actually read a Bible, or any other religion's holy text either. Plus, Savitar has only referenced commonly known myths and hasn't shown any in-depth knowledge.
Robin of Sherwood has Herne the Hunter as a powerful and possibly immortal shaman who is a core figure in English pagan spirituality. In actual folk tradition, he was only a not-very-powerful local ghost associated with the area around Windsor, and was either feared or despised rather than worshipped. There are no written records of the legend before it was used as a plot point by William Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Robin may have been influenced by earlier twentieth-century literary fantasies that treated him as more important, in particular John Masefield's The Box Of Delights and Susan Cooper's series The Dark is Rising.
The Librarians 2014 season four episode "And the Steal of Fortune" states that Jupiter had a contest between his four favorites (Minerva, Mars, Saturn and Fortuna) to see who would rule over humanity. Fortuna is a minor goddess in Roman Mythology, and Saturn is the father Jupiter deposed. Neither would be considered his favorites, or a candidate for such a contest.
Lucifer
- At one point a character makes the claim that "every religion has a devil who was originally a fallen angel." This is roughly on the same level of accuracy as claiming that every religion is monotheistic. Many religions have no Satan analogue, and most of the ones that do (aside from Christianity and Islam) don't depict that being as having been cast from Heaven - more commonly it's just an outside antagonist.
- Lucifer's psychiatrist, Linda, attempts an emotional breakthrough with Lucifer by invoking his past. She mentioned how he 'used to be known as Samael, the Lightbringer'. However 'Samael' actually means "Venom/Poison of God" and is not the same figure as Lucifer or Satan (though often compared to him due to being an adversarial angel, especially to Israel). It is the name LUCIFER that means 'Light Bringer'.
Moon Knight (2022): Arthur Harrow's Mystery Cult worships the Egyptian goddess Ammit, who judges people for their sins past, present and future, and kills them if they're found unworthy. In actual mythology, Ammit was not the judge, Anubis was. She merely consumed the hearts of those whom he deemed evil. Justified as Harrow explains that Ammit got tired of waiting for Anubis's verdict and decided to punish the wicked herself, and Lampshaded as Egyptology enthusiast Steven says he's never heard that interpretation before.
Legends of Tomorrow: The Big Bad Duumvirate of the fifth season are the Greek Fates (Moirai), consisting of Lachesis and Atropos (the remaining one, Clotho, is a member of the Legends under the nickname Charlie). The series nails it when describing each of the Fates' functions; Clotho is the spinner of life, Lachesis is the measurer, and Atropos is the cutter. However, Lachesis is depicted as the oldest of the sisters, both figuratively and literally. In Greek myths, it's actually Atropos who is the oldest.
Haven has the Bolt Gun Killer as its Season 3 arc villain, who has been able to hide among the people of Haven because their special Trouble gives them the ability to wear the skins of their victims. At one point, Nate speculates that, since Troubles are generally inherited along bloodlines and Haven has had a long, long history of people with Troubles, this Trouble could be the origin of the myth of the skinwalker among the local Native American tribes. This despite the fact that Haven is in Maine, and the Navajo are... not.

Manhwa

Ragnarok (1997) has the stoic Loki and the woman Fenrir, which people like to pair up. In mythology Loki was a Trickster God and Fenrir was not only his son, but an absolutely gigantic wolf.

Music

If Amon Amarth got a cent for every metalhead that misheard "Surtur" (a fire giant) for "Satan" in their song "Death in Fire", they would be very rich now. Admittedly, the mistake is honest - fire guy? Check. Starts apocalypse - double check.

Mythology & Religion

The ancient Greeks themselves were guilty of this- among others, they managed to identify the Egyptian Osiris (god of agriculture and the underworld) as, of all divinities, Dionysus. Probably because they both got dismembered, and also because Dionysus had agricultural associations, being the bringer of rains, which were far more important to Greek farming than river floods. And their only other notable agricultural deity being Demeter somewhat limited their options for comparison.
The Egyptians were one of the few civilizations to exist long enough to do this to themselves and leave written records behind of it having happened. The various Egyptian gods changed roles and relationships several times.
- Ra might be the best known example: For example was the god of the sun as everybody knows. Except that eventually he ended up as the creator god associated with the sky, earth, and underworld. The animal he is associated with is the hawk, though sometimes it is the falcon. And then politics got involved and he turned into Amun-Ra (since Thebes conquered Egypt but figured they couldn't just make their patron god Amun into the new top god so they merged their god with the most popular god in Egypt). Then shortly after that he was officially declared to not exist (along with all the other gods) and replaced with Aten a god who is the sun. That state of affairs only lasted until the death of Akhenaten whereupon the Cult of Ra restored Amun-Ra.
- And of course one might assume that mixing up Ra and Horus because they both have birds for heads is a modern invention but it is also a confusion that the ancient Egyptians themselves had. One of Ra's titles was "Horus of the Two Horizons".

Radio

Cabin Pressure has an in-series version. "Cremona" features MJN Air flying famous film star Hester Mcauley to Italy to make her next film. Hester is most famous for playing the Lady of the Lake in Quest For Camelot(not that one), who orders Arthur to bring her Excalibur - in the film, Excalibur is a person, not a sword, and he famously proves to actually be a vampire. No wonder Hester doesn't remember the film fondly.

Tabletop Games

Betrayal at House on the Hill has a scenario called "Worm Ouroboros", involving a giant two-headed snake that is trying to grow big enough to crush the house. The snake has more in common with the Aphisbaena (a snake with two heads, one at each end of its body) that the ouroboros (a snake eating its own tail).
Dungeons & Dragons does this quite often, usually because it runs on what's fun, interesting, and useful rather than what's accurate (especially since, given these are other worlds, they can take refuge in In Name Only).
- D&D has angelic beings known as Asuras and Devas, both of which are the names of benevolent spirits... but in different religions (Zoroastrianism and Hinduism respectively) both which use a variant of the OTHER name for a class of EVIL spirits. The angels themselves lack faces, at least in 4th edition, where Devas are metal-skinned humanoids with hundreds of past lives.
- There is a monster called a Medusa, which is ye olde snake-haired woman. In the original mythology, Medusa was an individual's name, and she and her sisters were collectively called Gorgons. D&D has creatures called "gorgons", but the mythic creature they most closely resemble is the catoblepas (a reference to a medieval bestiary that identified the two as one and the same). And the D&D catoblepas is a completely different creature that looks like a cross between a warthog and an apatosaurus (it's based on Gustave Flaubert's depiction of the creature in The Temptation of St. Anthony).
- Tiamat:
  - Contrary to Common Knowledge, Tiamat being a dragon in Dungeons & Dragons is not itself this trope, as some Mesopotamian myths do call her a dragon. And Enûma Eliš, while it does not specify Bahamut as such, is clearly not portraying her (as some claim) as human-looking either—unless humans have claws, tails and udders. What is this trope, however, is the specific, common depiction of her as a multi-headed, multicolored dragon, which partially originated in Dungeons & Dragons. Some of this is because Tiamat of the Sumerians and later Babylonians is often conflated with the Ugaritic god Lotan (in The Bible, God defeats both of them). Lotan is in fact depicted to be multi-headed and a sea god, like Tiamat. The multi-colored part is all 'D&D, though. This Artistic License is understandable in Dungeons & Dragons where she is supposed to represent the game's five races of evil dragons. It is less justifiable when it reappears elsewhere; for example, the writers of The Real Ghostbusters had one Mesopotamian-mythology-themed episode in which Marduk fights against Tiamat—and Tiamat has the form of a five-headed dragon! It's unlikely (but conceivable) that this is a Dungeons & Dragons reference as such; more likely, someone was familiar with the Dungeons & Dragons version of Tiamat and thought that the idea of Tiamat having five heads was authentically a part of the historical Mesopotamian version of the deity.
- Bahamut, the benevolent god of good dragons, is named for a giant fish/whale/turtle (depends who you ask) of Arabian myth, which carries the world on its back. This has spread to media that uses D&D as its inspiration, such as Final Fantasy. D&D also has a character named Kuyutha, Exarch of Bahamut (his champion of sorts), whose name is based on Kujata, the giant bull who rests on top of Arabian Bahamut.
- The lamia is a monster that, depending on the edition, is: a woman's upper body with a snake's tail instead of legs; a female lion-centaur; or a woman who can turn into a swarm of insects a la the Mummy. In Greek mythology, Lamia was a woman transformed into a child-killing demon, and later a whole class of quasi-vampiric spirits were called lamiae (singular lamia). Lamia also got confused with the Kabbalistic Lillith, a different child-killing demon, at some point. Just to keep score, the snake-woman's real name is "Echidna," the liontaur is "Urmahlullu," and the swarm-shifter is "Totally Awesome."
- In 4th and 5th Edition, each fomorian has a cursed Evil Eye that gives them a magical power, but also a painful curse. This was originally a quality of only Balor, but it was too cool a concept not to apply to the whole race.
- Changelings in 3.5e are humanoids that are part human and part doppelganger. Changelings in folklore are fairy children used as decoys for stolen babies.
- "Kobold" originally referred to a type of elf or brownie from Germanic folklore, usually found in a house, on a ship, or in a mine. It was applied to a race of small, dog-like, savage, cowardly, vaguely reptilian Mooks. They were implied to be related to dragons through their scaly skin and (according to the 2e Monster Manual) oviparity, a connection made explicit in 3e and 4e. In 5e, there are even winged variants.
- Deities and Demigods turns Sif, goddess of beauty, wealth, and the harvest, into Weak, but Skilled Action Girl. And it depicts Odin and Apollo as Chaotic Good. It also gives Hercules and Thor high Wisdom scores^note, and Hephaestus^notefamously lame in the original myths a base speed twice as high as a human's.
Exalted: Rakshasa in Hindu scripture are demon-like demigods who are generally evil. Raksha in Exalted are sapient vortexes of chaotic energy that happen to take human form, and serve as The Fair Folk. This came about in part because of a writing issue: a lot of material for the first edition Fair Folk book came in way too close to publication for a proper rewrite, yet not delivering anything near what the line developer wanted, meaning that the developer and one writer on hand ended up slotting in Hindu mythological concepts and Sanskrit words just to get something other than the European fae clichés they'd been given.
Golden Age Champions: An In-Universe example in the Fourth Edition. The sample villains included the Doberman, a less-than-competent "master villain" obsessed with dogs and dog-themed crimes, who dresses like the god Anubis (who he believes to be the Egyptian god of dogs). This is because, one, the guy is completely bonkers, and two, Anubis is playing along with this because giving heroes someone to practice on is worth a misdirected prayer.
In Nomine: The Words and interests of the Princes whose names were drawn from real-life demonology and religion were assigned more or less at random, and often don't really match their traditional associations. For instance, Asmodeus is Hell's inquisitor instead of being the ruler of Lust, which instead in the charge of Andrealphus, who in medieval demonology oversaw geometry and measuration. A number of demons drawn from the Ars Goetia also lack their associations present there — in addition to Andrealphus, Haagenti was associated with the transmutation of substances but is here the Prince of Gluttony, Furfur is a metalhead rocker rather than a deer-like figure who creates weather and storms, and Malphas is a patron of factionalism and paranoia rather than a creator of buildings and fortresses. Kronos is also depicted as being concerned with manipulating human lives for the worse instead of being a deity of time. The primary exceptions are Mammon, who retains his traditional association with the sin of Greed; Valefor, a Goetic demon who tempeted people into theft and is here the patron of thievery as a concept; and Vapula, another Goetic figure associated with philosophy, mechanics, and science and who is here the Prince of Technology. The Archangels hew closer to their sources, overall — Michael retains his status as Heaven's great warrior and (original) general of the Host, Gabriel is still Heaven's messenger and herald of the Final Battle, and so on.
Magic: The Gathering: Changelings, rather than being fairy children swapped out for human infants, are shapeshifters capable of taking on any form. Although the card Crib Swap indicates that changelings do sometimes pull this trick.
Pathfinder tends to be more faithful to mythology than D&D, especially considering that they use dozens of incredibly obscure creatures pulled from across the globe, but has its own share of Artistic License:
- Golems are depicted as they are in D&D — a general term for humanoid magical constructs, without independent willpower, intelligence, or voices, that can be made out of almost any material to serve any goal they master wants of them. In this, they differ very sharply from the folkloric Golem of Prague, a clay humanoid made by a rabbi to protect his community, which was both vocal and self-willed — indeed, his taking his mission into his own hands to a dangerous degree was a central aspect of the story.
- Wendigos are depicted as deer-headed, flying monsters with burned-off legs, created when a malevolent spirit possesses a mortal who commits cannibalism. The wendigo of Algonquian myth is described as a gaunt and skeletal human, does not have missing legs, and is associated with gluttony and hoarding food in a more general sense. It is also usually described as a transformed human rather than a victim of possession.
- The grootlsang is described as an elephant-serpent hybrid and a survivor of an ancient race of monsters that was created by the gods and then later split into the first snakes and elephants when they were too powerful to control; it is also described as coveting gems, especially diamonds, which can be used to bargain past the creature's "lust for cruelty". About the only things in common with the original folkloric creature is a generally reptilian appearence and an association with gems. The grootslang of South African folklore is a forty-foot python with diamonds for eyes that lives in the Orange River or a cave connected to it and guards a hoard of diamonds. Everything else — the elephant traits, the creation myth, the intelligence, and the ability to bargain with it — were invented for the game. Notably, due to the grootlsang's description in Bestiary 3 being pasted to the wiki article in 2012, this version of the story became the dominant one in internet folklore.
- The adlet of Inuit folklore is a human with dog legs. Pathfinder depicts them as out-and-out wolf people.
- Skinwalkers are depicted as a race of humanoids with innate shapeshifting, descended from werecreatures. The skin-walkers of Navajo folklore are evil witches who can turn into, possess, or disguise themselves as animals. Later editions rename this race to "beastkin".
- Oreads are a race of stony-skinned humanoids descended from earth genies and elementals. The oreads of Greek myth were nymphs who lived in and guarded mountains, serving as montane counterparts to the dryads of the forests and the naiads of the waters.
- The Nuckelavee is portrayed accurately by the artists, but the fluff describes it as "a manifestation of nature's rage against all who despoil its beauty". The mythological Nuckelavee (and the one in Dungeons & Dragons) is just a murderous monster.
- Tengu are depicted as street rats who care little for religion, and yamabushi are described as a type of oni that disguises itself as an evil tengu. A yamabushi is actually a type of hermit-monk in the Shugendo religion, also known as a shugenja. Tengu themselves generally appear in myth as exaggerated yamabushi, even more distant and spiritual than their human counterparts, with elements of The Trickster.
- Shikigami are portrayed as a race of tiny rock-men skilled with improvised weapons. In Onmyōdō a shikigami is any creature bound to a spellcaster as a servant, making it essentially identical to the Familiar of the wizard and sorcerer (but not witch) classes.
- A few of the monsters taken from medieval bestiaries are given heavy artistic license due to Rule of Cool. Bestiary 4's barometz refers to a gigantic ram-shaped mass of vegetation created by druids as a nature guardian whereas the mythical one was simply a very odd plant with a lamb attached to it like an umbilical cord. Also from Bestiary 4, the myremecoleon is an elephant-sized insect that spews acid while the mythical inspiration was a giant ant with a lion's head whose gimmick was it could not eat plants or meat, so it always starved to death.
- Leshies are depicted as tiny Plant People created when nature spirits are called to inhabit a specially-grown plant, exist to protect and guide natural processes, and come in various different types tasked with overseeing a different aspect of nature, such as leaf leshies, seaweed leshies, fungus leshies, cactus leshies, flytrap leshies and so on. The leshies of Slavic folklore are forest spirits resembling bearded human men and which can shapeshift into other forms, and are generally more similar to fey or minor tutelary deities than anything else.
Scion has a deliberate example. In Judeo-Christian tradition, cherubim are the second-highest rank of angels. When Thoth used angelic ranks to classify the Hands of Aten (which locked their power levels), however, he used "cherubim" for the lowest rank. The reason? Ever since Raphael, humans have associated "cherub" with winged babies (which themselves are derived from the Greek Erotes), and so the idea has more resonance than "cherubim" as kick-ass angel warrior, trapping the Hands thus named in a weakened state.
The World of Darkness, especially the Old World of Darkness, falls into this fairly often. Rule of Cool combined with Capital Letters Are Magic meant a lot of concepts in the setting were assigned names from real world cultures or mythologies, but often in a manner tangentially-related at best. (New World of Darkness writers are more aware of this and generally use real-world myths and legends more appropriately.)
- Mage: The Ascension: Gilgul is a concept of reincarnation in Jewish Kabbalism, but here it refers to the most severe punishment among Awakened: the removal of a mage's reincarnated Avatar. It's almost like referring to extinguishing a flame as "The Ignition".
- Vampire: The Masquerade:
  - The vampire clan of warrior-philosophers turned rebel-anarchists are the Brujah, derived from the Spanish word for "witch". While somewhat applicable, Brujah vampires have the most physically -based set of Disciplines (vampire powers); most other clans have far more overt mystical powers (e.g., the Tremere, the clan of vampire wizards, can actually throw fireballs).
  - The Ishtarri are a Toreador bloodline specializing in espionage. The goddess Ishtar was once immensely popular and held a wide portfolio, including war, beauty, sexuality, fertility, prostitution, justice, kingship, lions, and storms, but espionage was emphatically not one of them, and doesn't exactly fit her depiction as an aggressive hot-head, either. The Toreador themselves are something of an example, since Ishtar (as a vampire) is actually their clan-founder, but Toreador are primarily handled as a clan of snobby, artistic, sexy socialmancers, going all-in on the beauty aspect while mostly ignoring the warlike and kingly elements. In fact, they are often treated as fragile and somewhat wimpy, although, that tends to be a negative stereotype assigned to them by other clans and Toreador can be portrayed as capable fighters and leaders. Their New World of Darkness counterpart, the Daeva, seem to have been created to rectify this, possessing the same origin but a more suitable Interplay of Sex and Violence gimmick and often tempestuous personalities, though, again, this can definitely also apply to the Toreador.
  - A few relating to the Tzimisce vampire clan of East European vampire sorcerers and Body Horror makers: Vozhd is an old Slavonic word meaning "leader", but refers to giant, barn-sized Body Horror monstrosities the Tzimisce create by merging several dozen people or animals together. Bogatyri was a term for a group of medieval Russian folk heroes, but here it refers to a race of blonde giants who served the Tzimisce Antediluvian. Szlachta is a Polish word referring to a historic class of nobility, but here refers to ghouls fleshcrafted by the Tzimisce into pure killing machines.

Theater

Played with in The Rainmaker, where Starbuck tells Lizzie the story of Melisande, wife of King Hamlet, who was "the fella who sailed around the ocean and brought back the Golden Fleece." Lizzie is quite aware that Starbuck is making up things as he goes, like the Con Man he is.
In Victorian times, the Poetic Edda — an ancient collection of the Norse heroic legend — was re-discovered. Richard Wagner made them into operas, threw in some German myths, and we get the Ring cycle, which...well, it resembles the originals in places, but it's essentially a complete rewrite of the myths. And Wagner's Spiritual Successor to the Ring cycle, Parsifal, is the myth of the Holy Grail remade in the image of the Bayreuth Theater. At least Wagner didn't invent the sadly mythtaken Arabic etymology of Parsifal's name. Wagner's Ring is something of a cross between two versions of the same story, and Wagner's own personal sensibilities (the stories being the Middle High German Nibelungenlied and the Scandinavian Völsunga saga). It is very likely that the two stories share a common origin. Both purportedly feature the Burgundian realm by the Rhine and feature Attila as a minor character (Etzel in the Nibelungenlied, Atle in the Scandinavian version).

Video Games

Ōkami: For the most part, the game doesn't really care about mythological accuracy. However, one aspect is particularly relevant: mythological Amaterasu was associated with ravens, crows, roosters and horses, but not wolves; stories of sun devouring wolves are a staple in eastern asian religions, though admittedly not as common in Japan. This is due to being a pun, as Okami translates to either "great god" or "wolf", rather than suddenly bothering with accuracy on this one thing.
A Total War Saga: TROY: While the mythological units in Mythos mode are for the most carefully researched and accurately depicted, a number of goofs — some mostly cosmetic, and some quite noticeable — turn up.
- The portrayal of the giants draws traits from two types of beings that were very distinct in Greek myth. For the most part, they're based on the various types of giant barbarians that crop up in numerous Greek myths, epic cycles and geographies, which were mostly just very big and savage people. However, some of their traits, such as their scaled legs and their Children of Gaia trait, are based on the Gigantes, a group of very powerful and inhuman beings who were spawned by Gaia and were able to fight the gods one-on-one. Outside of sharing their modern names, these types of giants had nothing to do with one another in the source material (indeed, the Gigantes only started to be depicted as large-sized fairly late in history).
- The Corybantes are depicted as a unit of hulking humanoid lions. In Greek myth, the Corybantes were simply human worshippers of Cybele, and nothing resembling the in-game unit actually exists.
- The Spartoi are depicted as mouthless, cracked constructs of living stone. In mythology, the only explicitly unusual things were their origin and combat prowess — they were otherwise regular, flesh-and-blood human warriors, to the point of being capable of fathering children with regular people.
Valkyrie Profile, with Norse mythology. The game claims Ragnarok will be between the Aesir and the Vanir (the original has the Aesir against the Jotuns), Surt was in frost-encased Jotunheim (when Surt was a fire giant), and makes Frey and Freya into Aesir (they're Vanir), and Odin has both eyes . Also, in the original Japanese version, Frey and Freya's names were swapped. In either case Frey is female and doesn't really fit the mythological figure, but although Freya is an appropriate name for the chief goddess, it's not an appropriate name for a glorified gate guard.
The Heroes of Might and Magic games. All of them. The Dungeons & Dragons examples above also qualify here.
- In Heroes of Might and Magic, Nagas are portrayed as the Dungeons and Dragons monster, Mariliths. In fact, Nagas and Garudas are presented as Anthropomorphic monsters often. Garudas have actually been brought back to their origins because this ties better with the possibility that they might be Ancient Astronauts.
- The third game also has "Gorgons" that are giant metallic bulls, just like in D&D.
Final Fantasy:
- Shiva is a goddess of ice and snow and not the eight-armed male Hindu god of destruction. However, this mythtake is explainable: "Shiva" is a pun on the phonetically similar "Shiver" (ice, snow, shiver — get it?).
- Revenant Wings plays around with this however in that there are 3 Shiva Summons. Shiva, Shivar and Shivan. (Shiva, Darling Shiva and Baby Shiva in the Japanese version) Shivar is male (and stated to be Shiva's lover, while Shivan, again female, is her child).
- Several Final Fantasies also mess with Celtic mythology for a bit, including summons such as Cú Chulainn and Máel Dúin. This gets somewhat weird when it turns out Máel Dúin (or Maduin, or Madeen, depending on the translator) is actually important to the plot in FFVI and FFIX. (It gets even weirder when the only instance of the halfway correct translation of the character's name is a recurring random enemy called "Maelduin," who is a blind fish).
- Odin:
  - Odin and his steed Sleipnir, the latter of which keeps losing or gaining limbs with each interpretation. Odin himself always has both of his eyes, he has all of a sudden grown horns, and he is never found wielding his spear Gungnir, but rather the instant-kill sword Zantetsuken. At least he does use his spear in Final Fantasy IX.
  - In most of his appearances, his summon does a die roll and on success it uses Zantetsuken ("Iron-Cutting Sword"), killing everything on the screen, and on failure uses Gungnir, which hits one random enemy for a fair amount of damage. Zantetsuken ("Iron-Cutting Sword") is a reference to Gram, given to Sigurd, broken, and when it was later reforged, it split the anvil in half.
  - In Final Fantasy VII at least, he only uses the spear against enemies immune to instant death, there's no die roll involved.
- Final Fantasy VIII has the Guardian Force Quetzalcoatl (actually "Quezacotl" since there was only room for 9 letters), a bird-like Energy Being that shoots off lightning at foes. It was named after the Mesoamerican god whose name means "Feathered Serpent" and was the patron god of wisdom, knowledge, and the morning star.
- In Final Fantasy XI Garuda is shown as another female deity when all research points to Garuda being male.
- In Final Fantasy VII, a creature that is clearly a chimera is labeled as a harpy. However, this is a translation error; in Japanese, the creature is correctly identified as a Chimera.
- Bahamut is most famous for being the king of dragons in this series, and one of the most powerful summons ever. The actual Bahamut is a giant fish that supports the earth and has the head of a hippopotamus. However, in this case, Bahamut was borrowed from Dungeons and Dragons.
- Titan is an earth elemental, the only connection to the original myth being the name of its attack: Gaia's Wrath. Which is probably a complete coincidence.
- Quoting World of Final Fantasy regarding Ultros:
Ultros's name comes from Orthros, a two-headed dog in Greek mythology. There's no explaining the mental leap from a dog to a weird purple octopus monster, but one thing's for certain: his name comes from Orthros, but it definitely isn't Orthros. (Guess the memo hasn't reached everyone yet. Sorry, so sorry!)
Castlevania:
- The series falls into this a few times, although the strangest example by far is Zephyr, a time-controlling boss whose namesake was a Greek wind god (the boss itself is a Shout-Out to Dio Brando of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure).
- Gorgons are oxen wielding petrification breath, as opposed to snake haired ladies with petrifying gazes. They appear to be based on the Dungeons & Dragons creature of the same name, which are more closely based on a different creature, the Khalkotauroi.
- The series HAS shown gorgons as how they're usually portrayed, except these ones are all male, and can turn into several snakes.
- Succubi are... female vampires, as opposed to Hot as Hell demons. Made even weirder when non-succubi female vampires appear in Order Of Ecclesia. Sometimes they do make reference to them attacking in someone's dreams or sleep, however.
- Persephone is a demon maid if her description is anything to go by. In practice, she's a Ninja Maid. She's supposed to be Hades' wife...
- According to the official Castlevania timeline, Bram Stoker's Dracula is canon to the series. Except they base it more on the 1931 Universal movie (wooden stake as opposed to a Bowie Knife), have Quincey Morris' son witness the death despite the fact that he didn't even exist in the book, and Dracula is necessary to be defeated every time he's resurrected, which can fit in with the movie, but NOT the book, where killing Dracula frees his soul. And even though it's an Informed Attribute, he can apparently turn into a Wolf.
God of War:
- The series does this with Greek mythology, generally making it Darker and Edgier while excising some of the squick. But it generally hits on the established personalities of the deities. God of War makes an all-too common mistake modern adaptations of Greek myths often make (mainly due to Values Dissonance): depicting the Greek pantheon as ruthless tyrants who oppress and abuse humanity. (In the myths themselves, the gods are complex figures who are sometimes helpful and sometimes cruel depending on the circumstance, but in general the Ancient Greeks believed the gods were benevolent and that mortals who were punished by the gods deserved it.) It's somewhat justified in the ending of the final game where it turns out all the gods, including Zeus, were infected by humanity's evils after Kratos opened Pandora's Box in the first game.
- Beyond the personalities of the gods, the games are full of things that are nowhere to be found in the original myths but can be generally excused for the sheer amount they get right and are later explained in lore. Pandora's Box imbues Kratos with power that allows him to fight Ares on equal footing. The Golden Fleece is... a pauldron... which allows Kratos to throw balls of energy... All right, moving on. Kronos being condemned to wander a desert carrying a mountain likewise is a completely new invention by the developers but is similar to punishments of other enemies of the Olympians such as Prometheus being bound to a boulder and having his intestines eaten by a bird (maybe an eagle) only to regenerate/revive to be disemboweled the next day, Sisyphus being forced to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, and Atlas being condemned by Zeus to hold up the sky forever.
- Typhon was not a Titan in the original mythology. He was a monstrous enormous beast, the only being Zeus feared and almost singlehandedly overthrew him, but was defeated. However, his birth varies Depending on the Writer. Some stories have him as the son of Gaia with no father, born out of Gaia's rage at the Giants she sired being destroyed by Hercules and the gods. Other stories have Typhon as the son of Hera and only Hera. In another story, Typhon is born from Kronos semen being smeared across two rocks at the request of Hera, because she was angry at Zeus at the time. In none of these stories is Typhon a Titan. But it can be excused as Typhon was born, in a unorthodox way, from entities that were titans or had relations to titans, him being born from Kronos’ sperm can be used to depict Typhon as a monstrous Titan, as well as him being born by Gaia’s rage as her sexual relations to Uranus created the earliest generation of Titans.
- God of War (PS4) does a similar spin with Norse Mythology. For example, both the myths and the game has Baldur be associated with light and invulnerable to all things save for mistletoe. But while the former is so bright and beautiful that light shines off of him and was granted his invulnerability by his mother getting nearly everything in existence to swear to not hurt him, the latter is noticeably capable of Super-Speed and driven mad by his invulnerability because his mother caused it by casting a spell without his consent that had the side-effect of utterly removing his ability to feel, and the mistletoe vulnerability is because all Vanir spells have some sort of required weakness.
- The sequel God of War Ragnarök also has the giant eagle Hraesvelgr made female and conflated with Hel, the humanoid goddess who rules over Helheim (the Norse Underworld). Though worth pointing out is that she actually wants to step down from her position and give the title to someone else after Ragnarok has eventually passed.
In Too Human, the Jormungandr is a type of massive war machine created by Ymir, of which only one survives to the time of the game. This is particularly jarring, as prior to this, the game gets a surprising amount of Norse mythology right, and most of the divergences were necessary to the altered setting, or to the story they wanted to tell. For instance the Aesir are cyborg super soldiers who defend post-apocalyptic humanity from robotic "giants". But still resurrecting Baldr during the Fimbulwinter instead of after Ragnarok is new.
The final boss of Breath of Fire I is Tyr, the antithesis to the Dragon clan... an evil she-demon, with dragon like powers... Tyr, however, was the Norse god of single combat, victory, and heroic glory. He also had his hand bitten off by Fenrir when they tricked the wolf into allowing himself to be chained. This may have been an attempted Woolseyism: her Japanese name (Myria) doesn't seem to be a reference to anything. Except, of course, to myriad, which could be a reference to the demon called Legion, for he is many.
World of Warcraft:
- There's a male boss named "Skadi the Ruthless" in Utgarde Pinnacle. Skadi was the Norse goddess of winter and the hunt.
- There is actually a male Skadi in Nordic myth; they're just very, very obscure. The Wrath character could have been named for them.
- Wrath Of The Lich King is full of Nordic mythology counterparts, but they generally get it right. Freya (fertility) as a guardian of nature, Loken is a trickster, and so on.
- There are also a large amount of monsters inspired by D&D, which in turn are often named after various mythological beings but have very little resemblance with the original stories.
- Legion introduced Helheim: home of damned souls. In Norse mythology, Helheim was the home of anyone who didn't die in battle.
Devil May Cry:
- The first game hits almost close to accurate with Alastor, a sword found impaled into a statue of the Judge of Death: in demonology, Alastor is the name given to the supreme arbiter of the court of Hell. Or, alternately, Hell's chief Executioner. Furthermore Alastor is a Greek term for "avenger", notably both a title given to Zeus and the name of a man executed by Zeus, which would explain the lightning attacks in the game.
- Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening:
  - Although Cerberus is still a three-headed hound just like the guard dog of the Underworld in Classical Mythology, this Cerberus has ice powers, making him more of a Mythology Upgrade to his Divine Comedy counterpart.
  - Agni and Rudra are no longer the Hindu gods of fire and the storm respectively, but instead sentient scimitars wielded by headless brutes. While Rudra in Hindu mythology does have a secondary rubric in storms (and thus connected to winds), his primary shtick is as an archer. The Hindu god of wind is Vayu.
  - Beowulf, the hero of the Geats in the old English poem, is a dog-demon who later becomes gauntlets and greaves that glow with light in this series. Also, Beowulf's name and design really make no sense at all when you discover where his likeness came from. The inspiration for his design was Pazuzu (as confirmed in page 31 of the 3142 Graphic Arts artbook), a Babylonian demon of disease with a scorpion tail, two pairs of wings, claws on the feet and hands, and the face of a dog. Yet despite these, Capcom named him Beowulf, and described him a as demon of light.
  - Geryon, the monster from Greek mythology is said to be a giant with three bodies, and then later described in The Divine Comedy as a winged beast with the tail of a scorpion but the face of a man, is really a massive time-stopping horse that draws a large carriage. However, the giant Geryon was a horse owner.
  - Naming a succubus Nevan really doesn't make sense at all, as it would only when she's likened to a Leanan Sídhe or Baobhan Sith.
- The Basilisks from Devil May Cry 4 are straight up Hellhounds rather than the snake-like beast from European legends.
- DmC: Devil May Cry: Poison the Succubus is supposedly a succubus, but this hideous, ever-puking example of Big Creepy-Crawlies has nothing in common with the sex demons succubi are traditionally supposed to be except perhaps being female. The mythological resemblance is only "partially" accurate, since in the original myths and medieval demonology texts, succubi were hideous beings that used Glamour to appear as beautiful women and seduce men in their sleep.
Shin Megami Tensei:
- Pretty much in every single one of its numerous incarnations, does this to a very minuscule extent. However, they're generally excused for what little creative license they take for the sheer amount they get right, especially given the prevalence of this trope. As the massive bibliographies for the games included in some of the Japanese-only companion books clearly indicate, this is not so much a mistake as Rule of Cool. Rather disappointingly, though, especially with its traditionally major role in the franchise, Cerberus remains some sort of lion-wolf with only one head in all but three games, due to its portrayal in the original Digital Devil Story novels and anime from which the video games took off.
- One-headed Kerberos is actually the original portrayal. Later portrayals emphasised multiple heads, while varying on the actual number. The idea that it has 3 heads specifically did not sink in until the Renaissance. The three-headed version is thus, in itself, an example of both this trope and of literal Word of Dante.
- As an example of minor deviancies, Metatron is adorned with crosses despite not being in Christian canon. Many games also mistake the Zhu Que or Suzaku with Feng Huang whenever the Chinese names are used. The Zhu Que and Feng Huang were not always distinct, and in many non-Han variations of the four gods they are still considered the same creature. This might still be considered unusual for the SMT series, which, if anything, often errs on the side differentiating characters who, in the source material, were the same being named in different languages.
- The Egyptian god Seth is traditionally depicted as an animal that somewhat resembles a jackal, an aardvark, a fox, or a combination all of the above. Not in SMT, however; here, he's depicted as a gigantic black dragon. This is in contrast to all the other Egyptian gods in the series that are accurately portrayed (for example, Horus, Seth's foil, is portrayed as a falcon like in the myths). This may also be another artifact of Digital Devil Story where he had a serpentine and draconic appearance; the author admitted that Set's appearance as a snake was inspired by Robert E. Howard.
The Battle of Olympus isn't as bad as some examples on this page (apart from the necessary change of having Orpheus fight monsters that were killed by other heroes in the actual myths, and placing some creatures and characters in the wrong locations), but still has a few clangers. Gaia is depicted as a sexless-looking, hostile golem, rather than the goddess of the Earth. On a smaller scale, Orpheus' love interest is renamed Helene (Eurydice who?), the Hydra has only one head, Prometheus is guarded by the Nemean Lion rather than savaged by an eagle, and Circe is depicted as an old crone instead of The Vamp. Hades is the Big Bad, but that's somewhat justified by his kidnapping of Helene being modelled on that of Persephone in the myth.
Golden Sun doesn't even bother with accuracy, as many of the summon names were pretty obviously assigned based on what sounded cool.
- Boreas, minor Greek god of the north wind, is a giant snow-cone machine in the Golden Sun universe. That is all. Until Dark Dawn, in which he became a giant, literal Iron Horse. Wait, what? Only thing they got right about Boreas is that it is the wind the brings winter, fitting the ice theme.
- Ramses is a ridiculous giant head with even more ridiculous floating fists.
- Cybele is a surprised-looking tree-horned frog. Subverted in Dark Dawn when it is revealed that said frog is actually Cybele's assistant.
- Perhaps the most hilarious example occurs with the summon Neptune (derived from the Roman name for the god of the sea, Neptunus). At certain point in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, you fight a boss named Poseidon, which is the same entity only now under its Greek name. You can technically have the summon attack itself. Never mind that the Neptune summon is a giant whale with a Wave-Motion Gun for a blowhole.
- And then there's Moloch, the Canaanite god of Biblical fame, whose man-made idol with a fire in its stomach was apparently offered babies by its worshippers. In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, it's a giant yeti on four legs that exhales a blizzard at you.
- Coatlicue, the devouring Aztec goddess with snakes for head and clothing, a statue of whom was allegedly excavated by archaeologists who were so disgusted by it that they immediately buried it again, is a Miko who pours Water of Life to heal your party.
- Dark Dawn does change the Horny Viking Thor's beard from blonde to red at least. He swaps out his hammer for a giant turbo fan in the process though.
- Daedalus is a Humongous Mecha that uses Macross Missile Massacre. What. Well, Daedalus was the ancient Greek equivalent of a Gadgeteer Genius...it's something.
- Haures is an Ars Goetia demon who controls fire. Here, he is a massive-clawed demon who poisons people. Having said that, poison and burn in video games sometimes do behave similarly (causing Damage Over Time), so from a certain point of view it isn't completely wrong.
- Ulysses appears as a wandering sorceror in traditional Japanese garb, rather than a Greek warrior-king (albeit with a trickster side).
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance: That One Boss Moloch is not a Canaanite god who eats babies, but rather someone who gets to be controlled by Quan Chi and Shang Tsung.
Rygar: The Legendary Adventure. It's very obvious that they didn't care about accuracy, and the game doesn't suffer for it.
Kid Icarus:
- Kid Icarus (1986): The queen of the underworld is Medusa, Pluton is a common enemy that steals your weapons, Pandora is a giant soap bubble and goddess of calamity and deceit, your loot can be solen by the god of poverty even though poverty was the domain of the goddess Penia and Thanatos is a snake that lives in Medusa's hair.
- Kid Icarus: Uprising either fixes these, changes them, or plays them for laughs. Palutena herself is supposed to be Pallas Athena, but is now pretty much a different character entirely (her most notable trait? She's a Troll). Hewdraw was supposed to be Hydra, but now is a flying 3 headed dragon with a Multiple Head Case, one of which has a british accent. Thanatos decides to add the much needed "h" into his name, stating it's for "Hamaaaaazing!", and is explained to be a shapeshifter, with his original role of God of Death intact. Medusa is brought closer in line with the original myth, being cursed to take a monsterous form by Palutena for her vanity, she still has snake hair but is less monsterous since her return. She still has the face of a monster and her head can detach itself from the body, and after she dies its revealed she was not the queen of the underworld at all. It's Hades, who just used her as a distraction.
- Pit himself is an angel, despite the fact that there are none in Greek Mythology. He's actually closer to Cupid/Eros due to his use of bows, and has been depicted as shooting heart arrows at times. Uprising plays with this by keeping the fact that he's an angel, and then making the Angel Bow shoot hearts to keep the discrepancy up.
- Of course, the game gets its name from Icarus, who was not an angel, but a human whose wings were made of wood, feathers, and wax and attached to his arms. In the myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun, causing the wax in the wings to melt, and then he fell to his death. Conversly in the original game, Pit's wings were generally useless, but he shared his mythological namesake's tendency to fall to his death.
- Zigzagged: in Uprising, Pit can't fly naturally, but Palutena and Viridi can give him the ability to do so. However, he can't use this power for more than five minutes or else his wings burn up. This is not Gameplay and Story Segregation. Most flight segments last for less than five minutes, but he goes over the limit in one cutscene. His wings burn up, revealing some bones which are very much not made of wood, feathers, and wax.
- One of the bonus shorts that promoted the game had Thanatos attack humans with Trojan Horses, except they were clearly horse shaped wooden AT-ATs.
- The Grim Reaper is a race, called Reapers. And they're evil. They don't bring death (though they can), but rather harvest souls of the dead, presumably for use by the malevolent underworld gods.
- Averted with Twinbellows, which is an exact Cerberus expy, just with fire breath and a name change... though he has two heads instead of the standard three (which calls to mind an actual two-headed canine from Greek mythology, Orthrus).
Two high end level magic spells (only found in two special Magic Wands) in Shining Force III where Tiamat (shaped like a technicolour dragon) and Thanatos (who took the form of a giant shimmering purple giant that attacking by swirling tentacles at foes).
In Tomb Raider I, Lara enters a room labelled "Thor" in an ancient temple complex in Greece and has to deal with smashing hammers. This was acknowledged by the creative team and corrected to "Hephaestus" in Tomb Raider: Anniversary.
There are several liberties taken for some mythological deities in Smite:
- Poseidon is capable of releasing the Kraken. In truth, Kraken is a creature from the Norse mythology and while Poseidon has control over a sea creature (like in the Andromeda tale), it's more usually a Sea Serpent. Kraken was shoehorned in to make a reference to Clash of the Titans.
- Neith is a goddess of many things, including being war goddess, hunting goddess, weaving the universe. What becomes a liberal interpretation is that in here, Neith is extremely bubbly and cheerfully cute.
- Vulcan is shown to still be resentful over Juno (Hera) casting him off Olympus when he's still an infant. As a result, he instead locks himself in his forge and makes as many items as he can in a vain attempt to ease that hatred, abandoning his wife Venus. In most other series, we usually see Vulcan as the decent guy whose wife is just plain unfaithful despite his love, but here, he's not completely guiltless.
- Aphrodite is revealed to have cheated a lot because she was being abandoned by Hephaestus (read above, Hephaestus is Vulcan's Greek counterpart), in order to feel that she's not a worthless wife. And to top this off, Aphrodite turns out to be genuinely remorseful over her winning Paris' favor that resulted the Trojan War. Usually, we saw her as one of the less sympathetic goddesses for her unabashed cheating spree and probably was more content that she won Paris' favor and the title "The Fairest".
- Ao Kuang had this so much. For a Dragon King of the Eastern Seas, his skill set was more heavily around summoning storms and winds rather than water-based. His personality is kind of meek too, so it's not clear if it was during his time as a proud and cruel king, or after he received Humiliation Conga from Sun Wukong and Ne Zha. As a result, Ao Kuang was retired temporarily while his old skillset is transferred to the Mayan God Kukulkan (who is more wind-based) and he is set to return with a more humanoid new model and having more dragon-based (and slightly water-based) skills, including an execution. Under the five-elemental system of China, a rain-based skill set for such a character could possibly be more a matter of Shown Their Work. Especially since Wood, the element of the East, is associated with the ocean, and its patron symbol is a dragon. While it's counter-intuitive in terms of what we might think of as an 'element', rain is associated with Wood/Tree element, rather than Water. The Chinese 'elements' are types of changes, rather than types of substance. Wood represents growth, precipitation, and cool, gentle-yet-powerful movements — traits associated with Wind under Greek philosophy, and most definitely associated with the ocean and dragons in Chinese.
- Speaking of Kukulkan, a few of his default voice lines have him talking about human sacrifice despite the fact that there's no evidence he took human sacrifices (at the very least, his more famous Aztec counterpart Quetzalcoatl didn't).
- Mulan has achieved apotheosis in the game's lore, while in the original ballad she stays a regular mortal human even after she dies. What makes it even more ironic is that her ballad has very minimal divine or supernatural elements to the point that her story ends up feeling way more historical than mythical.
In spite of what they get right, the developers of Age of Mythology do get a few things wrong.
- The Flavor Text for the Dragonscale Shields upgrade, which identifies Grendel as a dragon.
- When Tale of the Dragon expansion was first released, Huang Di (the Yellow Emperor) was conflated with Yu Di (the Jade Emperor), who is a different mythological figure entirely, in his description in the in-game encyclopedia. This was corrected in a later patch.
Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) gives the name Iblis to the mindless, destructive part of Solaris. In the myths, Iblis was a crafty, cunning and highly arrogant djinn (a being of fire), and essentially was the Devil in Islamic mythology, as Satan is in Christian mythology. His primary activity is to incite humans and djinni to commit evil through deception, which is essentially what Mephiles does in the game, rather than Iblis. The only thing they have in common is that they're both beings of fire.
Fire Emblem:
- A lot of the characters' names are taken from various mythologies, but the characters' roles don't always follow the narrative of the original myths; Naoise and Deirdre are not a tragic couple, Naoise is a simple knight and Deirdre's tragic romance is with Sigurd, who came from a different mythical pantheon.
- The most notable case of mistaken myth is the bow Ichaival/Yewfelle. For the longest time, the Japanese wiki seemed to be under the impression that the bow belonging to the Norse God of Archery, Ullr, was called Ichaival, because Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War associates the bow with the crusader Ullr and her descendants. There's no mention of Ullr's bow name in the myth; the game was likely corrupting Ýdalir (or "yew-dale"), Ullr's divine home, into Ichaival through language rendition (イチイ = ichii/yew, バル = bal/val, "valley"). The name bleeds into other works like Symphogear through Pop Culture Osmosis.
Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep: The final area, the Cavern of the Gods, takes its cues from Egyptian mythology, with alters dedicated to Osiris, Horus, Isis and Nephthys. Except that all the related statues are male (complete with beard postiches), Osiris is depicted with a papyrus scepter (which is traditionally feminine), and Isis has Osiris' trademark crook. Horus is also missing his trademark falcon head, but depictions of him as fully human aren't unheard of.
The app Gods of Olympus has this in its story mode, where the main villain turns out to be Lycaon of Arcadia. Here, he is portrayed as a Manipulative Bastard who tricks Zeus into destroying the empires of two rival kings before luring him into a trap with the intent to kill him, which results in his empire being destroyed when Zeus escapes and rallies the gods together. This never occurred at all in mythology, where Lycaon was merely a king who tested Zeus' omnipotence by serving him the flesh of his murdered son, and was turned into a wolf as a result (this also being where we get "lycan", genus word for wolf).
- Also, the two kings Lycaon tricks Zeus into destroying are named as Tantalus and Sisyphus. Needless to say, while these two also angered the gods, and both got severe punishments- Tantalus being forced into having food enchanted away from him (this being where we get the word "tantalize") and Sisyphus being forced to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll out of his hands all the way back to the bottom and force him to start again- neither of them ever interacted with Lycaon.
Immortals Fenyx Rising largely averts this, with Genius Bonus and Shown Their Work being predominant in its prominent and subtle accurate citations of Greek myth.
The Shadow Hearts games fall to this from time to time but it's usually overlooked due to a combination of translation hiccups and really obscure subjects. A noteworthy example is Kerufe from From The New World. In the original Mapuche Myth, Cherufe was a giant magma creature responsible for volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. In the game? A giant, monstrous insect described as "the queen of hatred and resentment".
Legend Of Ace:
- Hestia as a Fire Goddess. While it's true that she has domain over warmth of home due to being the Goddess of Hearth, it's not that often that it's translated as Hestia being a fire master akin to Hindu's Agni.
- Daphne is an actual goddess of laurels in Greek mythology. But she somehow speaks in complete Sanskrit.

Visual Novels

Downplayed in Double Homework. Dennis calls the protagonist “Esau” as a reference to the biblical hunter who sold his birthright for a bowl of stew, proving himself more brawny than brainy. Parts of his personality are portrayed correctly, but sleeping with girls wasn’t the scenario the author had in mind when he wrote down that story.
The Fate Series section of the Nasuverse tends to change myths around a lot, but these are usually intentional creative changes. Fate/hollow ataraxia, however, does make two genuine mistakes.
- When recounting the backstory of Rider/Medusa and her sisters, the narration explains that Stheno and Euryale had perfect immortality, unlike the rest of the Greek gods who needed to eat the golden apples to sustain theirs. This is incorrect; it was the gods of the Norse pantheon who had to eat the golden apples of Iðunn to retain their youth (possibly they got mixed up with the Ambrosia the Greek gods ate, which could supposedly grant immortality, although the gods weren't necessarily dependent on it themselves).
- Rin wonders if Saber's Idiot Hair is her "reverse scale", so she cuts it off to see what will happen, resulting in Saber transforming into her Alter form. However, reverse scales are only a feature of East Asian dragons — a scale on the underside of their chins that causes the normally benevolent Eastern dragon to go berserk if agitated — while Saber was infused with the blood of a Western dragon. It is explained in later lore that all dragons have reverse scale, but it's not always in the same place. Elisabeth Bathory, who is dragon-blooded in this universe, has her reverse scale near the base of her tail.
Minotaur Hotel: Minor, but the Minotaur in myth was said to be human in all but his head (though some ancient pottery depicted him with a tail). Asterion in this game has hooves for feet and his body is covered in fur. Justified considering the art was made by a furry artist, so some Artistic License was to be expected. On the other hand, unlike the cannibalistic beast Athenian slander made him up to be, he is a sweet, cultured, mentally human.

Webcomics

In Jet Dream, Athena appears before Harmony to deliver cryptic clues in the fashion of the ghost of J.E.B. Stuart in DC Comics' The Haunted Tank feature. And also to show Harmony new outfits designed by her readers. The supposed writer of Jet Dream identifies Athena not as the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare, but as a "ghost-girl warrior of olden times."
Lampshaded and averted in Spinnerette, when Heather asks her roomate Sahira (who is Hindu) why she hasn't likened her to a Hindu goddesses (since she has six arms), Sahira laughs it off and tells her she only bears the most superficial resemblance to a Hindu goddess, and it would be like saying she looks like Jesus because she grew a beard. Played with later, when Sahira ends up with six arms (long story)^note and saves a bus full of children. A small Indian girl clearly thinks she looks like Shiva, and Sahira politely denies it.
Schlock Mercenary had this happening In-Universe, minced with Future Imperfect up to this:
Ennesby: The reverend offers a tutorial on mythological and religious metaphors you might be interested in.
Kevyn: Yea, though I waltz through the valley of the chattering death...
A definitely intentional example in Olympus Overdrive. Poseidon's ...uh...encounter with Medusa is reduced to a mere consensual kiss. Poseidon's one of the main characters, and you can't very well be sympathetic character after that.
This happens all throughout Holy Bibble. While the comic does get some things right, it also plays fast and loose with the facts of mythology fairly often. IE: The goddess Nanshe is Satan's daughter. Osiris and Anubis are the same person: a female fallen angel who likes to cosplay. Humbaba is a monster ordered up by Shamash from a vending machine in Tartarus.
Stand Still, Stay Silent: Narrative choices result in this happening to the Norse Mythology, Finnish Mythology and Christianity-inspired elements. To take a Norse Mythology example that is documented in other pages of the wiki, the quasi-Gender-Restricted Ability status of Norse magic is kept, but the cause is changed from Sex Magic to blessing from the Norse Gods.
Averted in Rhapsodies when Brian derails a Francisco D’Anconia expy's filibuster by pointing out that; 1. Atlas held up the sky, not the earth, and 2. He wouldn't be able to shrug because Perseus turned him to stone using Medusa's head.

Web Original

Erotic works in the furry fandom sometimes use part-animal gods as sex symbols, regardless of how much sense it would make (although Zeus was famous for shape-shifting and then having sex, so this isn't anything new). Anubis: Dark Desires, an erotic comic book anthology, is a prime example. Except, weirdly enough, apart from the erotic aspect, those stories remain fairly true to the mythology.
Cleolinda Jones pokes fun at the examples from the Clash of the Titans remake in her Movies in Fifteen Minutes review of it.
HADES: Are we clashing yet? Is this clashing?
ZEUS: Well, technically, our parents were the Titans, but your hellrobes don't go too well with my sparkle armor, so maybe that counts.
All over the place in Beyond the Impossible. Handwaved with the real gods being hundreds of thousands of years older than all civilizations, with Classical Mythology being only indirectly based on them. Some are relatively close (Vesta, mostly because there are barely any myths about her), some are wildly different (Persephone has almost nothing to do with the myths other than her parents and her husband)
The How Stuff Works page "10 Incredible Dragons We'd Like to Meet (or Run From)" is somehow under the impression Kilgharrah appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, rather than being completely made up for the TV series Merlin (2008).

Western Animation

In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, one of the opening sequences has Batman and The Outsiders fighting the Kobra Cult. The cultists are feeding a Human Sacrifice to a giant snake called a Kali-Yuga, which will usher in the Age of Chaos. In Hindu Mythology, Kali Yuga is the Age of Chaos (that's basically the translation), and we've already been in it for more than 5,000 years. No giant snake was involved.
Pandora's Box in Danny Phantom. For one thing, it turned Pandora into a supernatural being who guards the Box from being opened. In the actual myth, Pandora is the first woman in the world, and she opens the Box because she can't resist the Schmuck Bait. The box-opening idiot in the show is the Box Ghost.
Fanboy and Chum Chum has Greek ambrosia in the Norse pantheon.
Gargoyles's portrayal of most mythic beings, for example the Banshee causes deaths rather than just foretelling them and Sleipnir has four legs instead of eight. However Gargoyles does not claim to represent the myths, but rather the "real" events that evolved into the myths, so this is mostly deliberate. The various gods and such were clearly presented as being related to The Fair Folk of European folklore, in keeping with the show's world-spanning Crossover Cosmology. And not everything is different from the myths: for example, Anubis is quite neutral and emphatic about his nonpartisan role, not evil as in many modern stories. Also, the series' co-creator has explained that the error involving Sleipnir's legs was due to the animation company being unable to animate an eight-legged horse, and presenting him as a four-legged one was better than not having him at all, or just using crappy animation. He stated he would've greatly preferred an eight-legged horse, but had no choice. So, he hand waves as best he can in his mind: like all the other Third Race, the horse is also a shapeshifter.
Kim Possible repeats the usual error in making Anubis a demonic figure of menace instead of a sedate guide.
Mummies Alive! did this with Egyptian mythology in so many ways: Egyptians believing in reincarnation, Ancient Egyptian deities behaving more like rogue mystic entities behaving loosely like their mythological namesakes (when Anubis, god of the dead, is portrayed as a moronic entity with a dog motif, you know it's bad). When Anubis is portrayed as god of the dead, or god of death, you also know it's bad. That role belonged to Osiris; Anubis was a very minor god of embalmment.
An episode of Tutenstein has Set trap Ra for Apep — he'd never actually do this, as Set and Apep are mortal enemies and Set has the role of fighting Apep off during Ra's journey through the underworld during the night. (This is sometimes believed to be The Artifact of an earlier role of Set as a positive chaotic figure, opposed to Apep's negative chaotic aspect — others argue that it's just a mythological instance of Summon Bigger Fish) The show actually brings this up, however; when Cleo points out that the myths all say that Set was an ally of Ra who helped him in his battles with Apep, Set just shrugs and says, "For thousands of years I served Ra, but now my time has come to rule the world and have others serve me!"
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- The show uses "Alicorn" to refer to the winged unicorns who act as royals. While far from the first to make this error, it became the most popular, causing no shortage of people familiar with mythology to tear their hair. In an odd inversion, it's well-known amongst the fanbase that "alicorn" does not refer to a winged unicorn but a horn's material. Fans ignore it and use "alicorn" anyway because it sounds cool, to the point where it's become Ascended Fanon. Prior to Friendship Is Magic, fans often used "unipeg", "pegacorn", or just "winged unicorn" to refer to such ponies.
- In European folklore, a changeling is a fairy child left by fairies in place of a stolen human infant. In the show, they're insectoid equines capable of innate shapeshifting.
- "Three's A Crowd": The tatzlwurm is based on the tatzelwurm from Alpine folklore, a mythical hybrid said to have the head and forepaws of a cat with the long scaly tail of a snake. The one in the show is instead a huge Sand Worm very obviously based on the Graboids from Tremors.
- "P.P.O.V.": In Aboriginal myth and Australian folklore, bunyips are ferocious and very dangerous predators found in freshwater bodies such as swamps and rivers. In this episode, the tri-horned bunyip encountered at the end is a peaceful, friendly herbivore found in the sea.
The Secret Saturdays: Some cryptid portrayals diverge from their original accounts, in some cases by quite a bit.
- The Ahuul is depicted as a monkey with pterosaur wings on its back. Real-life descriptions of the creature typically describe it as a giant bat.
- The Garuda seen in the show is a huge eagle with no other outstanding traits. The mythological Garuda is usually depicted as a winged man, a humanoid bird (usually with distinct arms and legs), or some middle ground between the two, and usually carries weapons or armor. This is downplayed, however, insofar as the actual Garuda doesn't appear; the creature seen on-screen is an illusion.
- The Grootslang is depicted as a giant green elephant with four tusks, horns, and a long, spikes-tipped tail. The folkloric Grootslang as described by South African folklorists and travelogues was a fifty-foot python with diamonds for eyes. The closest thing to the show's version is from the 2001 book Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth, which describes the beast as "huge, like an elephant, with a serpent's tail".
- The Mapinguari is depicted in the manner common in cryptozoology — that is, as essentially a surviving giant ground sloth. The Mapinguari of Amazonian folklore is a cyclops with a mouth on its belly.
- The Piasa Bird is depicted as a horned, pterosaur or wyvern-like creature with an arrowhead-tipped tail, hands on its wings, and no mammalian traits beyond a small beard. The Piasa depicted on the Mississippi River murals is somewhat poorly known due to the original depiction being lost, but the contemporary descriptions on which the modern replica was based describe it as having deer antlers, a bearded human face, and an extremely long tail tipped in a fish fin. The wings in the modern version aren't recorded by earlier sources.
- The Rakshasa is a horned, tusked, and purple tiger. The Rakshasa of Indian myths are depicted as monstrous humanoid demons, and are only rarely specifically tiger-like.
- The Shedu is essentially a Dimetrodon with a monstrous face and a lizard tongue. The Shedu of Babylonian myth and art was a counterpart to and often synonym for the Lamassu, a bull or lion with wings and a human head.
- The Bunyips are depicted as basically Australian gremlins, being small, mischievous critters who loves to mess with technology and take things apart, but otherwise harmless. The actual mythical Bunyip is described a large, man-eating, swamp monster that rarely, if ever, leaves water.
Scooby-Doo: Fairly common, albeit potentially justifiable — most monsters are simply the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax of the Week, and thus explicitly fakes, and inaccuracies can be excused by their purveyors' ignorance about the legends they're emulating.
The Venture Brothers: In "Escape to the House of Mummies — Part II", this trope is invoked to establish contrast between Dr. Orpheus and his Master. The Master appears as a large three-headed dog and says he took the form of "Argos". Dr. Orpheus immediately corrects him that Argos was the completely mundane dog of Odysseus, and he means "Cerberus". The implication is that the Master did this on purpose to point out that Orpheus can be an unpleasant know-it-all. He's not wrong, because Dr. Orpheus is an expert at averting this trope:
Dr. Orpheus: What pyramid cult?
Dr. Venture: I don't know. Papyrus, Osiris, something like that. You ever heard of him?
Dr. Orpheus: Osiris cult? OSIRIS? First-born son of the womb of Nut, begotten of Geb, the Lord of Ekhet, whose existence is forever-lasting? Yes, I've heard of him. Do you even know what I do for a living?
Miraculous Ladybug: The titular villain in "The Pharaoh" invokes various Egyptian gods to give him powers. While Sekhmet (goddess of war) giving him Super-Strength, Anubis (god of funerary rites) giving him the ability to turn people into mummies, and Horus (god of the sky) giving him flight feel at least somewhat logical, getting Time Master abilities from the god of writing and knowledge (Thoth) is a bit too much of a stretch. Also, the backstory for the episode's plot involves an Egyptian pharaoh trying to sacrifice a woman to the sun god Ra to bring his wife back from the dead — there's little to no evidence that the ancient Egyptians did human sacrifices, and that's without getting into the Artistic License – History regarding the pharaoh and wife in question (the identity of which depend on the dub).
In a very early South Park episode when Mr Garisson was so deep in denial about his sexuality that he became a Boomerang Bigot, he got vampires and gays mixed up. Stan asked him "What's a homosexual?," and Mr. Garisson described a creature that needs to drink fresh blood to replenish the supply flowing through its "decaying veins" and can't stand sunlight.

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What Mythology is This?

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What Mythology is This?

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