In Popular Culture
- Barry Hughart's fantasy novel, Bridge of Birds, is loosely based upon this story, though the two figures are switched. The girl is forced to remain on earth, while her male paramour is in the heavens. She is a peasant girl, and he shepherds the stars.
- In the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid, the protagonist attends this festival with his female companion and sees the story reenacted in a shadow play.
- American post-hardcore band La Dispute's song "Four" is written about an alternative version of this story, with a Great King taking the role of separating the lovers, due to her neglecting her duties at the loom. In this version the lovers are a princess and a shepherd, and it replaces all the mythology in the original story. La Dispute's first LP has a recurring theme of this story, including the album title: Somewhere At the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair.
- In Kamen Rider Den-O, the series' second rider, Kamen Rider Zeronos, was based heavily on this legend. His Altair form had the motif of a bull (linking to Altair's occupation as a cowherd), his Vega form uses a spool of thread for the visor (linking to Vega's occupation as a weaver). The sole link between the forms is an imagin called Deneb, linking to the bridge that can reunite the lovers.
Read more about this topic: Qixi Festival
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
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“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)