conflation

Much as a meme is an elemental unit for the transmission for a particular idea or phenomenon—a cultural analogue for the notion of a gene or some defined inheritable trait—a mytheme (or mythème first proffered by ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss) is the fundamental measurement of commonality in terms of a trope or archetype across received folkloric traditions. The intended intersection of the arc of narrative and the characters of The Tempest (1610) with Forbidden Planet (1956) or Heart of Darkness (1899) with Apocalypse Now (1979) are a few examples with many more threads to be teased out by structurally analysing the stories that strike us a universal.