Consider the following search:
Now consider the following results from that search:
post #3813702 An anthro cat with his Pokémon.
post #3760047 Two dragons having sex.
post #3781541 A fox with cum leaking out of her vag.
post #3806734 Is Santa Claus "mythology"?
post #3720780 This is literally a Digimon, come the fuck on.
post #3550663 Someone's bird OC with six eyes.
post #3633615 You, most likely.
I feel that "mythology" is one of those tags we have come to passively accept the existence of despite nobody ever actually using it. When you remove the tens of thousands of automatically added instances and drill down to the relatively few posts where it was added manually, the resulting collection of posts is just... nonsense.
In the literal sense, the word "mythology" only means "stories", something which describes the vast majority of content on this site. Some stories are older than others, some stories are unoriginal. Literally the oldest known statue in human history was a guy with a lion head, but we don't pretend the thousands of drawings we host on the same theme are an intentional callback to that.
I could keep going. post #3637297 is two run-of-the-mill bird anthros, nothing distinguishing it at all. The artist diorionarh has flooded the tag with "mythology-inspired" OCs like post #3562032, which do not directly reference any existing mythology. post #3487291 is apparently tagged "mythology" because one of the characters identifies as a fairy, though if it had been up to me I'd have tagged it elf and been done with it. Can someone point me to where post #3379374 appears in the Bible?
And then of course we have the posts which were incorrectly tagged mythology by implication from now-removed tags, but the tag was still there because nobody notices it. post #3830872 was tagged gryphon because there was a gryphon in the parent post. post #3821030 was tagged "peter" "gryphon" instead of "peter_griffin". The user who added "gryphon" to post #3643088 immediately changed their mind, but didn't quite undo all their damage. post #3807866 was tagged loch_ness_monster, which doesn't even imply mythology, and was wrong anyway.
I get the basic idea of "fanart of a character or story you didn't create is still fanart, no matter how dead the author". The vast, vast majority of posts in the mythology tag do not meet that definition. The fact that its non-automated use is so sporadic, unmonitored, and mostly invalid is a telling sign of the real problem.
gryphon and eastern_dragon alone account for over half of all posts. The definition of these tags, in their entirety, are "cat/bird hybrid" and "dragon with mustache". Almost nobody drawing those species is referencing any "real" (as in, known outside this site) mythology at all. The wiki attempts to lay down a definition of which parts should be cat and which should be bird but nobody listens; a beak and wings are usually the most you can hope for. You can't browse the parent tag for any mythological references without filtering out at least those two tags first.
It's not even consistent on its own terms: western_dragon doesn't imply european_mythology and dragon implies nothing by itself. A minority of dragon posts do get manually tagged mythology, but again there's no real sign of any mythology being referenced. And then there's centaur, which is literally a creature from Greek mythology, and a better-defined one than dragons at that. But because taurs get special treatment on this site, no implication for you. Hmm, it's almost as if someone thought that tossing all the taur posts into mythology would bloat it to the point of uselessness.
When the only requirement for a tag is the presence of a species, and there is no official reference sheet for that species or those which do exist are notoriously contradictory, TWYS completely collapses. Somehow we've ended up with a 9th-most popular copyright tag on the site which does nothing at all.