Your posts bait me the most in this comment chain. But, really, this is for you and a couple of others, yo.

Father figure if you like, yes; millennials don't have priests or gods, but they can have Petey.

Nope. On all accounts. Hold up...

...Pinging /u/wakawakalame and /u/whale_toe because you're all having fun missing the point. Why you gotta over-complicate things?

He's playing daddy figure to a bunch of millenials who never had a daddy.

Eh, mooooore... he's playing a Grandfather figure that reads bed time stories to a bunch of millennial who never had a Grandfather read them bed time stories. I did. They're a treasure...... Which leads me to attempt to explain this bit...

Look at the cult of personality that has sprung up around this guy...what does he say that is so captivating?

Because he's not only playing Grandfather reading a bed time story, he's playing Grandfather Peter Falk from the The Princess Bride

He tells old stories that no one else bothers to because they've been deemed this or that or whatever. It's that simple.

rejection of postmodernism.

No shit he would do just that.

Maybe people just want to be told a sincere version of old myths and fables. To understand why Peterson isn't fond of postmodernism, have a look at how fairytales have been told in the last 20 years?

Shrek was so mean spirited and cynical and recently, Frozen was so artificial and cynical...

Show me a modern retelling of a fairytale of fable or myth, and they'll be some deconstruction or doing something 'clever' and 'unique' ...