Such examples lead us to reexamine scholarship's historicizing tendencies and consider whether the positing of a historical reality behind legends and epics perhaps obscures as much, if not more, than it reveals. As an alternative interpretive strategy, some scholars have turned to psychology. That is, Shri Badat, as the last Buddhist king of Gilgit, has been turned into a tyrant and a cannibal in order to discredit Buddhism by demonizing the previously sacred. This interpretation, however, still retains the central notion of the historicity of the legend, a suspect notion as I have argued above. Furthermore, legends just don't behave in this way.
Legends are legends in part because they persist.
The basic structure of a legend is not inverted 180 degrees by the winds of change of human affairs. As a case in point, we do not find a demonization of Rama in Muslim Malaysia. Folklore does not readily permit its morphology to be completely restructured. The interpretation may vary, but the morphology stays the same. It is widely observed that legends help people understand their own history.