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[devoutvesta]

Nonetheless, even when Apollo spoke through his priestess, it was her voice the questioner heard: the god himself remained hidden. There were stories of individuals meeting gods, but almost always the god would be in disguise and the meeting only brief. During sacrifices cult statues, observing the rituals through the open doors of their temple or brought outside to be closer to them, might stand in for gods, but they were only statues, not the real thing. It was a basic understanding in most of Greco-Roman religion that the gods could only be indirectly known.

Mystery Cults in the Ancient World by Hugh Bowden

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i can’t help but wonder…how they will meet!!!

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mediocre disney property that had potential but was ultimately executed poorly strikes again 😔

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I'm Your Man, Mitski /// “you said the lambs were ready,” come the slumberless to the land of nod, Traci Brimhall /// I WILL BE GOOD AS LONG AS YOU WANT ME, @thegirlhoodtheory /// 'the reciprocity of the attack dog and the hand that holds the short leash' (edited), @brutaliakhoa /// Moon Song, Phoebe Bridgers /// Still Life Based on Hunting (detail), c. 1665-1701, David De Koninck /// It Will Come Back, Hozier /// "you’ve always been more of a dog person," @tdaspoetry

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Another request. Biblically accurate Rapunzel

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I love this, and I totally agree! I just wish we got to see that gradual descent into complete hatred of even her own subjects. I don’t think Morgouse tortured her, but the theory is interesting to explore and definitely ties up those loose ends in-between seasons.

its possible that morgouse did the tiana deiga ritual on morgana, i like this theory. however, morgana returned after a year.

the torture worked quickly on gwen. but if morgana was absent from camelot for a whole year, it may have taken months of torture to weaken morgana’s mind and manipulate her into hating her loved ones. morgana’s stubbornness and mental strength/endurance is incredible, we have seen that. she, hypothetically, would have been healing, and then resisting the torture for months, before falling under the spell and becoming evil. after that, there would have been a couple more months or weeks of planning with morgouse before she returned to camelot.

it definitely explains the massive switch up between seasons 2 and 3. i miss my sweet morgana :(

[devoutvesta]

its possible that morgouse did the tiana deiga ritual on morgana, i like this theory. however, morgana returned after a year.

the torture worked quickly on gwen. but if morgana was absent from camelot for a whole year, it may have taken months of torture to weaken morgana’s mind and manipulate her into hating her loved ones. morgana’s stubbornness and mental strength/endurance is incredible, we have seen that. she, hypothetically, would have been healing, and then resisting the torture for months, before falling under the spell and becoming evil. after that, there would have been a couple more months or weeks of planning with morgouse before she returned to camelot.

it definitely explains the massive switch up between seasons 2 and 3.

[devoutvesta]

The ways Zeus is characterised in ancient sources is ~ fascinating ~ to me.

The overbearing patriarch of the Iliad who keeps his godly family in check with constant threats of abuse and domestic violence. The conciliatory diplomat of the Odyssey, acquiescent to the desires and honours of his fellow deities. The ideal king of the Theogony, commonly elected, virtuous alloter of good and evil. The frightened tyrant, the cruel tormentor of Prometheus Bound. The all-encompassing orphic entity, who swallowed down and brought forth and is the entirety of the cosmos. The enigmatic, ambivalent, and sometimes undignified figure who refuses to appear on stage. The embodiment of righteousness, of majesty, the ultimate good, the promoter and dispenser of justice, the adulterer, the rapist, the upholder of oaths who perjures himself in the name of "love".

Above all the mastermind, the constant plotter, whose plan and will [Διὸς βουλή] permeate greek literature from epic to philosophy, whether it be synonymous with fate or not.

This is why I generally dislike simplistic takes on him. Sure, almost any way you choose to characterise him will probably have a sourced basis, his multifaceted "identity" almost guarantees it. But the massive loss of complexity is so disappointing imo.

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the beast! the wicked one! it!

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the general attitude towards adaptations makes no sense to me. i understand being upset at disrespectful and inaccurate depictions of the gods, i really do. but epic: the musical does not do that. the characterization is very well done even if it takes creative liberties. your love for a good adaptation shouldn’t be dependent on how similar it is to the source material. if that’s your criteria, you aren’t ready to consume greek mythology adaptations.

“epic the musical will never top the original odyssey” it was never meant to. stop expecting it to be an exact replica of the source material. jay (the creator of the musical) has said multiple times that it is a LOOSE adaptation, and that there are several creative liberties that it takes to support the overarching theme and also because he can not include everything in a 40 track musical.

“odysseus’ trauma is not talked about enough in the musical tho” it is talked about in every single song. he is grieving in nearly every song. his biggest inner conflict has to do with his grief and love for his crew, and his need to survive and get home to his family.

an example of misinterpreted scenes:

the motive behind his choice in remember them had nothing to do with being provoked by athena. THIS was his motive. he was angry, he had lost his comrades. “the blood we shed, it never dies” he’s seen enough bloodshed in war, he’s killed so many, but its become a constant part of his life. he is so unbelievably traumatized because of it. and yet he has to do it again and again. this is a moment of rage on behalf of his crewmates who died, not because he was throwing a tantrum.

expecting a 40 song musical adaptation of the odyssey to be identical to a 20+ book poem is actually so hilariously stupid. do you expect forks to be found in the bathroom? you’re expecting snow on a summer day and then getting angry that it’s just sunny. if you have unrealistic and baseless expectations, don’t get angry when they aren’t met.

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the beauty of new disney

there is an influx of people who praise the older disney scores while criticizing the newer ones. their criticisms, for some incomprehensible reason, seem to focus mainly on Encanto. the disney film with the most accurate and well written representation of an underrepresented community.

the scores for the newer movies are gorgeous, so much detail is put into disney’s music. especially Encanto, which features so much Colombian culture. why is it that when POC ask for more representation in disney movies, through live actions or otherwise, we are told to ask for brand new disney characters rather than white people’s hand-me-down princesses. but when disney finally makes a movie like encanto, the princesses and the movies themselves are compared constantly to the classics. the sentiment is undeniably rooted in racism. i say this as a fan of the classics, as someone whose favorite princess is aurora.

here are some of my favorite scores AND songs of the recent disney movies:

princess and the frog

• ma belle evangeline

• fairy tale/going home

• the frog hunters/gator down

• down in new orleans (every version, but mostly the finale)

• almost there

tangled

• flynn wanted (tangled)

• waiting for the lights (tangled)

• crossing the line (tangled the series)

• wind in my hair (tangled the series)

• let me make you proud reprise (tangled the series)

• something that i want (tangled)

• kingdom dance (tangled)

• i see the light (tangled)

• mother knows best reprise and when will my life begin 2nd reprise (tangled)

• i’ve got a dream (tangled) definitely reminds me of an fantasy rpg video game

• listen up (the series)

• ready as i’ll ever be (the series)

• buddy song (the series)

• livin’ the dream (the series)

raya and the last dragon

• betrayed

• running on raindrops

moana

• tulou tagaloa

• te fiti restored

• i am moana (song of the ancestors)

• know who you are

• we know the way

• hand of a god

frozen

• vuelie (frozen)

• frozen heart (frozen)

• into the unknown (frozen 2)

• for the first time in forever (frozen)

• let it go (frozen)

• lost in the woods (frozen 2)

• for the first time in forever reprise (frozen)

• love is an open door (frozen)

• all is found (frozen 2)

• iduna’s scarf (frozen 2)

wish

• knowing what i know now

encanto

• dos orugitas

• what else can i do?

• colombia, mi encanto

• isabela la perfecta

• the cracks emerge

• waiting on a miracle

• the family madrigal

• we don’t talk about bruno

• las hermanas pelean

• the house knows (a masterpiece)

• la candela

the little mermaid

• vanessa’s trick (the little mermaid live action)

• for the first time (the little mermaid live action)

• i remember (the little mermaid 3)

• the daughters of triton (not recent but go listen)

• athena’s song/endless sky (the little mermaid 3)

[devoutvesta]

"How do you write such realistic dialogue-" I TALK TO MYSELF. I TALK TO MYSELF AND I PRETEND I AM THE ONE SAYING THE LINE. LIKE SANITY IS SLOWLY SLIPPING FROM BETWEEN MY FINGERS WITH EVERY MEASLY WORD THEY TYPE OUT. THAT IS HOW.

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people listening to EPIC: the musical, tend to write off zeus as arrogant/horny in thunder bringer, who just loves to hear his own voice. its shocking how little people actually know about zeus.

he is the god of moral conduct, law and order, and justice. he is quite literally the “thunder bringer” or the one who makes “the judgement call”. he passes judgement and punishes wrongdoers, specifically when it comes to hubris.

gods can not commit hubris themselves, it is exclusive to mortals. hubris is the act of defying or disrespecting the gods, often in combination with excessive pride or arrogance. it is odysseus’ crew that committed a transgression against the sun god, and zeus doled out the consequences. he even punishes odysseus by giving him the choice between himself and his crew, staining his hands with more blood.

zeus is intimately familiar with pride because hubris, offensive to the divine, is a punishable crime and zeus is the one who enforces that punishment. another person mentioned zeus being the patron of xenia, which is another good point. xenia is a recurring theme in the odyssey. odysseus’ crew disrespected the home of the sun god.

oftentimes, hubris is presented in the myths as an act that leads to your downfall, and the ancient greek playwrights did this with the intention of warning others against committing hubris.

many of zeus’ epithets are in relation to this, for example:

CATHA′RSIUS (Katharsios), the purifyer or atoner

HO′RCIUS (Horkios), the god who watches over oaths, or is invoked in oaths, and punishes their violation

NOMOS (Nomos), a personification of law, described as the ruler of gods and men

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due to personal reasons i am evil now

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ancient greek word of the day: ἀναξίμολπος (anaximolpos), queen of song, epith. of Urania

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self care as a devotional act for aphrodite doesn’t have to be beauty-centric. aphrodite is also the goddess of love.

self care does not have to involve ‘glowing up’. it can look like working on your self esteem, learning to treat yourself kindly.

instead of splurging on makeup, learn how to be comfortable enough with your natural beauty to go outside with your bare face.

instead of being materialistic and buying every trending skincare product, embrace a simple routine and work inward. work on both your physical and mental health, not just one or the other.

take care of yourself. how you take groom your appearance should not determine what self care means to you. self care is about taking care of your inside.

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I don’t want people to take away the wrong message from the post. I do think that the movie was anti-feminist and harmful. The damsel in distress is not a positive representation of women, and all the criticisms towards her characterization are warranted. Their issue is not with her falling in love, but with what the sedentary role she plays in her own story represents for women, and how love and pain is essentially all she seems to have. Disney Princesses were and are intended to be role models.

But in my opinion, she does exhibit autonomy and independence in some ways, which I elaborated on above.

I’m so glad you found my post interesting! I enjoy learning about neglected fictional characters and sharing all the information I find about them :) Remember that we can love these characters, but still acknowledge their shortcomings.

A Deep Dive Into Disney’s Most Underperforming Princess

Princess Aurora can’t even be described as controversial. To most, she’s simply boring, too passive, and a continuation of the bland cycle of white princesses who wait around for magic or a prince to save them. Although no one hates her, they find her irritating at the worst, uninteresting at best. In the fifties, they must have thought the same thing. Sleeping Beauty was a commercial failure, and led to company wide annual loss. Sleeping Beauty had followed several other financial flops, such as Bambi and Alice in Wonderland, the latter costing Disney around half a million dollars. Due to her lack of popularity, Aurora may be one of the most neglected Princesses. Many cling to her out of nostalgia, or because she has a nice design, and they find it hard to defend their love for the movie. But the movie’s turbulent history and the amount of detail that went into Aurora herself is what really makes her so incredibly fascinating.

Starting with her design, Disney hired Marc Davis as the supervising animator for Aurora. He also animated Maleficent. The intention was for them to be realistic enough to be placed against the heavily detailed backgrounds of the movie. Davis had embraced this artistic direction, while many of the animators found it, and especially Aurora, laborious and tiring to work on. Both Maleficent and Aurora had to be refined and dynamic. Davis was Disney’s go-to animator for ‘pretty girls’, examples being Tinkerbell and Alice. His knowledge of anatomy and the human body brought both Aurora and Cinderella to life, two of Disney’s most visually iconic characters. Davis had also incorporated Art Nouveau and Art Deco into Aurora’s design, while the tapestry-like art style of the movie was chosen by Eyvind Earle, who was inspired by pre-Renaissance European art. The score and songs were based on Tchaikovsky’s ballet.

Aurora alone required more effort and attention to detail than any princess before her. It took Walt Disney and his team three years to choose a voice actress. They nearly scrapped the project until they discovered Mary Costa, but Disney himself avoided interacting with her in person early on in the project, fearing that she’d influence his vision of the movie.

Aurora was loosely based on her voice actress. Her appearance and her habits (such as gesturing when speaking and singing) were both incorporated into Aurora’s animation. She was also drawn to resemble both her live action model, the same one as Cinderella’s, Helene Stanley, and actress Audrey Hepburn. Davis took inspiration from Audrey Hepburn’s slender physique and elegant demeanour.

In the book Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment, author Douglas Brode referred to Aurora as “a model of modern (50’s) female glamour” and compared her to Brigitte Bardot. He also compared her gown to the work of Christian Dior.

As a character, she was described by Nerve as being “the apex of women who made no choices for themselves.” Aurora is a member of the “Golden Era” of Disney heroines, the original Princess trifecta. Her dreams are the same as those before her. But it’s possible that Aurora’s dreams of true love derived from the need for companionship outside of her three fairy godmothers.

On their website, Disney describes her as, “graceful and kind. She knows that a wonderful future awaits, if you just have the courage to dream it. Aurora enjoys using her imagination and sharing stories with her forest friends. She is also loyal in her relationships -- to her animal friends, her fairies, and her kingdom. Aurora believes in a wish and remains hopeful that she will find the adventure she is looking for.”

Walt Disney himself described Aurora as being “a very layered character/different. She’s calm, yet playful. She has a sense of humour, and she has an imagination.” We can not argue that she was considered layered through the lens of the fifties, because many critics disliked all three of the original princesses for their passive personality, or lack thereof. But from the perspective of the team working on the show, they saw much more to her.

This was the film that Walt Disney worked his hardest on, it took ten years to complete. It was also the very last Princess film he was involved in. Her ‘layers’ were very much intentional. Disney tried to do the same thing with Cinderella.

With Cinderella, they attempted to make her less passive than Snow White, and they showed this through her rebelling against her abusive stepfamily. Maurice Rapf said, "My thinking was you can't have somebody who comes in and changes everything for you. It can't be delivered for you on a platter. You've got to earn it. So in my version, the Fairy Godmother said, 'It's okay till midnight but from then on it's up to you.' I made her earn it, and what she had to do to achieve it was to rebel against her stepmother and stepsisters, to stop being a slave in her own home. So I had a scene where they're ordering her around and she throws the stuff back at them. She revolts, so they lock her up in the attic. I don't think anyone took (my idea) very seriously."

The toned down version of Cinderella, although rebellious in her own way, is still toned down. That part of her character was written out. In comparison to what she would have been, she is passive. Aurora and Cinderella are both less passive than their predecessors, but passive nonetheless. All three of them are the staple damsels in distress.

However, Mary Costa described Aurora as “very strong”, citing her urge to defy her guardians as a display of independence and an example of her strength. Aurora was raised by three women, and had never met a man in her life. Costa believed that because of this, she was ‘innately romantic’ as opposed to lonely or depressed with her sheltered life. To quote, “there was a certain part of her that maybe she didn’t realise, that was just so romantic and maybe expecting something that–she didn’t even know what.”

She believed that her being raised by three older women rather than her parents made her “a little bit older, and yet, she…had this young, outreaching spirit.” Author Douglas Brode points out that the fairies’ independent raising of Aurora mirrors “precisely that sort of women’s commune numerous feminists experimented with throughout the seventies.” Aurora living in an isolated, female-only space, with female authority, is reminiscent of the bold and liberating radical feminist movement. In her own way, as a peasant, she was independent. And that independence and autonomy was taken from her upon discovering that she was royalty and betrothed to a prince. She was leaving her home and the presumed man of her dreams behind, and not of her own free will.

Aurora had enjoyed her simple life, it had fulfilled her, even if she desired more. She had dreams of finding romantic love, which she talks about in the movie’s song ‘I Wonder’. Additionally, her close relationship with animals demonstrates her loving and kind personality. She has a whimsical imagination, and it’s scenes like the ones from Disney’s Enchanted Tales series and ‘Once Upon a Dream’, that would support Costa’s claim of her being a romantic. Where she’s changing in and out of pretty gowns with a magical wand, and giggling to herself. Or dancing happily with the forest animals, thinking about her imaginary prince. In ‘Keys to the Kingdom’, she proudly sings about wishing to make decisions with her heart.

Her independence is demonstrated on multiple occasions in Disney’s discontinued Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams. Aurora graciously accepts responsibility of her kingdom while both her and Philip’s parents travel away for a business trip. All on her own, she is determined to get all of her Princess duties finished on time, the hard way. She refuses to take the easy way out, time and time again, even when she doubts herself. She works harder than even her father, who would take the easy way out by signing royal documents without reading them. Even when Meriwether gives her a magic wand to help her out, she reads and fills out every royal form diligently, and helps out all of her subjects. She manages to complete her tasks on time and throw a banquet for her family and Philip by the time they return. The lesson here is to ‘stick to it’ and to ‘persevere’. But her insistence on doing everything on her own is shown once again in A Kingdom of Kindness, where she must plan a surprise party for Philip. The three fairies attempt to help her, but she continues to tell them that she wants to do it on her own. This series was cancelled, and it is difficult to find any clips of it online. But this short-series gives us some insight into Aurora’s character.

She is assumed to be the protagonist by most, but many consider the three fairies to be the protagonists. They help move the story along, they protect Aurora, and they have distinct, in-your-face personalities. Many consider Aurora authentic, or the title character, but whether she is the protagonist or not has never been agreed upon. Her lack of role in the story has been criticized by many. But some take it as an allegory for the lack of control

The most lengthy debate surrounding Aurora has to do with how feminist her character is. She may have been an improvement from the previous princesses, but she is not regarded as a particularly feminist character.

The three original princesses, all being pale-skinned European princesses with a naive and endlessly forgiving (an unrealistic standard), sends a message to their viewers that this is what princesses should look like, how they should behave. All three classic princesses are deeply intertwined with Disney’s long history of racism and bigotry. In an attempt to amend this, Disney has released back to back live action remakes of their movies, all receiving mixed reviews. Maleficent was Sleeping Beauty’s remake, focused on a maternal relationship between Maleficent and Aurora. Many people interpreted the scene where Maleficent’s wings get cut off in her sleep as sexual assault. This inclusion made many survivors of sexual assault feel represented by the character.

From my perspective, the original Sleeping Beauty is technically a movie centred around women. A teenage girl lives with her three surrogate mothers, who end up saving her in the end from the female antagonist. Although Prince Philip’s role in the story is still a large part of what moves the plot along. It is Philip who is captured, as Maleficent knew that he would go looking for her. He courted Aurora, defeated Maleficent with the help of the three fairies, and kissed the princess awake. But he still doesn’t get as large of a role, or nearly as much screen time, as the three fairies.

In short, both the movie and the princess fascinate me. And although there is depth if you squint, a character does not need to be fleshed out to be lovable, or at least endearing. Aurora is my favourite Disney Princess, and I find the history behind her and the film to be more interesting than what meets the eye.