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Sally on the money

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Silly comic of my silly kids

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a few reminders because i’m tired and angry

fandom is a hobby, not a form of activism

adult women aren’t inherently creepy for being in fandom and having hobbies apart from raising babies and doing taxes

the vast majority of people pushing back against the worrying trend of instigating harassment over fictional characters and relationships aren’t incest supporters or pedophiles, actually

liking a m/f ship doesn’t make someone a dirty heterosexual invading your space

preferring gay ships doesn’t make you ‘’woke’’ and good

no one owes you a disclaimer that they are a good person who recognizes that their favorite fictional villain’s actions are evil and that they don’t condone those actions irl

liking a fictional villain is in no way comparable to advocating abuse/murder/genocide/etc and you’re a fucking idiot if you believe that

just because a woman is attracted to a fictional villain doesn’t mean she’s promoting toxic relationships or going to end up in a toxic relationship. assuming women can’t tell fiction and reality apart stinks of internalized misogyny 

some rando’s a/b/o fanfics have none of the level of influence that popular tv shows and movies spreading propaganda have

no one owes you a detailed description of their traumas and mental health problems

abusive relationships are not the same as enemies to lovers ships

y’all need to chill the fuck out over people, relationships, actions and events that don’t actually exist and learn how to enjoy and discuss them like normal people

fandom is a hobby, not a form of activism

feel free to add more

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I think it’s very weird that when one country is criticized y’all tend to be like “oh well my country we would never —” uhh YES in your country too, that’s how states work? Y’all talking about people living in China or the US not knowing their history because the bad parts aren’t taught well in school: sure!!! But I know many people from Belgium who know next-to-nothing about the genocide in the Congo, from the Netherlands who say all their colonies were only trading posts, from Thailand who say that the indigenous people in their country have been and are treated fine only they don’t make an effort to be Thai, from Portugal who will tell you about what an amazingly positive force they were in their… territories, from Czechia who will tell you their country holds no responsibility for treatment of the Roma—but also it was and is justified; all were taught these things in school.

My point isn’t “other countries do this too so it doesn’t matter!!” No! My point is that every single state commits and covers up atrocities in some way. There is no ethical state.

American liberals especially seem to have a tendancy to think that there is a Good and Perfect state and we must only find it and imitate it and then our problems will be fixed. But trust me: it doesn’t exist, (and it’s certainly not in Europe??). We must create our own systems, and have the courage to change those, too, when we see their flaws.

[medusas-stylist]

▪︎Dagger.

Period: Mughal

Place of origin: India

Date: 2nd half of 17th century

Medium: Carved rock-crystal hilt, inlaid with gold, rubies, and emeralds.

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I legit think Tumblr should just be removed from the ios store so we can get titty n cock back. It's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make

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hoo exists entirely before gay marriage was legalized in the us AND pjo exists before gay marriage was legalized in NY

wtf

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coming back to the pjo fandom 4-5 years later only to see people crackshipping connabeth??? what did i even miss.

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sometimes i forget that percy’s base reaction every time he sees a god is to fight them. just right off the bat he’s like “oh you think you’re something special?” and then he wins.

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on the gods

i’ve been thinking a lot about the the gods lately; being in greece does that to you, because you see the insane landscapes, the monumental ruins, and the wonderful people, and you start to realize that the ancient gods were far more than the stories we have; every time i pass by a church, i see greeks making the cross in passing too, and as i spend my days digging up the athenian agora, through homes of christians and pagans, i am starting to understand just how much religion permeates greek society. it doesn’t much matter the name or number of deities, religion is and was—i’m a terrible prognosticator, so take this with as many grains of salt as needed—and will be a central part of greek society.

all this thinking has made me realize how little i think gods as human characters in myths actually mattered to the ancient greeks. yes, plato complained about bad behavior from the gods, and yes eventually lots of religious symbolism was used by hellenistic kings and then roman emperors as propaganda, as well as legions of poets for dramatic/poetic effect. but in the end, the ancient greek probably behaved much similar to depictions of regular people in the homeric epics or as hesiod.

this really clashes with our modern view of the gods as characters in a world of myths and lore and magic, which has become so mainstream we mock the idea of the gods being worshipped. i mean the entire pjo and hoo series is essentially telling you the ancient greeks were stupid for worshipping such capricious and greedy beings. this is, of course, not developed out of thin air—pagans were systemically removed from greece after the conversion of constantine, and the “rediscovery” of “classical” thought didn’t lead to a revival of paganism but instead a caricaturing of those gods. christian scholars latched on to depictions of the gods in ovid, or even homeric depictions (taken entirely out of context), in an attempt to remove any sense of wonder or worship-ability from them. the gods were recasted, with copious help from the ancients themselves (though it is conspicuous that much of what remains, transcribed by christian monks, is negative towards the gods), as bit characters in plays: capricious, hedonistic, powerful, greedy, and jealous.

pjo, and the extended riordanverse that’s sprung up from it, isn’t necessarily the “culmination” of thought on the greek gods over the past half-thousand years, but it is a synthesis. the gods are out-of-touch, horny, opulent, and narrow-minded. they jealously guard their power, ironically at the expense of their power as they refuse to deal with the rising threat of kronos or gaia. their behavior in hoo is even more despicable, as they close themselves off, upset they couldn’t win a war on their own.

both kronos and gaia are, in most interpretations of the story i think, the lesser villain. they are the big bad in both series, but there’s never really a fear that they’re going to win. i mean, it’s a kids/ya series. there is, however, a feeling that maybe the gods won’t do enough or won’t do enough on time, and a favorite character will die, or something bad will happen, and it will be blamed on the gods’ absence. the gods aren’t “villains” per se, but they aren’t a source of good. the gods don’t fall neatly into the modern american/protestant ideas of manichaean good and evil, a benevolent God and a sadistic Devil. thus they end up leaning towards the devil. they are greedy forces that sap away the pure good of characters like percy or ruin the good of characters like luke with meaningless quests to get “glory” (which is a whole other topic; why are we so willing to throw under the bus other societies’ universal goods? have we just not heard of other societies beyond Western society?). of course, the gods can be good too, like Hestia and maybe Poseidon, and Apollo in that horror story called ToA that I will forever refuse to read. there, they are benevolent parents, or watchful guardians, helping the hero along to defeat the big bad.

the gods in the riordanverse are saddled, then, either with “semi-evil dick” or “mournful parent” (or Hestia). most of the world’s issues are blamed on them. kronos? zeus’ blindness and the other gods’ aloofness. gaia? zeus’ blindness and the other gods’ complicity. polluted rivers? poseidon isn’t doing enough. ww2? the gods got horny. corrupt industries? nero’s fault (and the other ones that’s about the extent of my ToA knowledge). [i’ll return to pan, dw.] it’s not humans at fault, at the end of the day, but the gods’.

much of this comes from depictions of gods as rulers in the hellenistic and roman periods, specifically apollonios and ovid as well as the most cherry-picked moments from the homeric poems and ovid. most of it, it can seem to any classicist reading pjo, didn’t even come from the source material, but from condensed modern versions like edith hamilton’s, which hammered out the inconsistencies into a semi-coherent story that just didn’t exist in antiquity. because of this, much of the source material is taken out of context, stripped from its original society and inserted into 21st century America without a thought about the culture that came up with the original mythology. as a result, characterizations of gods that align with hellenistic rulers or roman emperors moreso than widespread popular beliefs become our modern ideas about those gods, while any thought of diachronic or geo-social differences goes out the window.

none of this is to say rick needed to be a classicist, or that any of us need to be in order to engage with the material. because we don’t. this material is free for us to use as we wish. i don’t mean to gatekeep at all; one of my guiding principles is that chaos is good, so go buck wild. what i mean to deal with more here is how the gods map onto modern political thought and our own philosophies about how the world works. i’ve seen this trend way too much, and it’s gotten… tiring as of late.

the gods take their characterization mainly from hellenic rulers and roman emperors/generals. but in rick’s work, they often end up being very similar to politicians, especially zeus, and especially politicians from 2006-09. now, before we get started, this is not to suggest that rick’s work was intended to have these political undertones. i just believe that, as a man who i presume stays up to date on things, rick has preconceived notions about power and power systems that permeate his writing. in the 2000s, conniving politicians led the west into a disastrous war in iraq, more or less blind, lying to the world through their teeth about their true intentions. they cracked down on a disastrous war against drugs and policing systems that led to thousands of black and brown americans dead, incarcerated, and poor. they installed massive surveillance systems that upended travel and the way we go online. they mismanaged a financial crisis that turned out to be the worst in seventy years, one that many people saw coming. and to top it all off, they sat on their hands about climate change. the gods, too, led demigods on pointless quests that led to massive young death tolls, or didn’t help them survive even to 12. they listened to every word of demigods for blasphemy and insult, but didn’t lift a finger if they were in trouble. they nearly went to war with each other many times over pointless issues. and they refused to look kronos or gaia in the eyes as a real threat, choosing instead to sit on their hands and hope for the best.

with or without intention, rick’s gods are similar to 2000s politicians. because of course they are. once you characterize gods, make them human, then they’re just really powerful humans. and in our day and age, powerful humans are called politicians (and businessmen). even if this wasn’t intended at all, it was still going to happen.

and just like we blame politicians and businessmen for our problems, we blame the gods for percy and cos’ issues. it’s just so much easier blaming the gods or politicians or businessmen than having to look back at ourselves and ask who decided to move to the suburbs and create car culture, who ate the red meat about the iraq war, who voted for george bush again, who still buys from amazon, who sat home for election after election? a lot of this can seem like putting the burden on the individual for societal issues, of course. but it is not. just in the same way the gods are not at fault, nor is any one of us individually. instead, we as a society are at fault, because we as a society are so much more comfortable not dealing with the issue until it’s staring us dead in the face. we go about life like rote machines, consumed with myself rather than us. we’ve built a culture around social media, focused on the individual rather than the community; zoned community buildings out of our neighborhoods; fled to the suburbs and pulled money out of public schools; we buy and buy because we’ve been conditioned to get just a little bit of relief from material goods. we just constantly want more, and not for us as a community, but for me.

there is no such thing as a wrong interpretation of anything. but i do think “the gods are bad” is a bad interpretation. it turns the burden of responsibility from the society to the individual, to overly powerful beings who happen—just like politicians—to have the same faults as each one of us. which is even more ironic, because the ancient greeks, the pre-platonics, believed so strongly in ideas of hubris and justice, in a deep sense of suffering on earth that was only relieved by the emergence of highly community-oriented political groupings called the polis. and no, not hubris like annabeth’s pride and desire to build big. but hubris in the sense of humans reaching too high, breaking the natural order of things, and as a result being punished. not by greedy gods who wished to hoard their power, but by just protectors of the natural order—the environment, the legal system, peace. this is not to say the ancient greeks were at all progressive, because they were not. but they would not have been shocked by how we reached for too much—a unipolar world, all the material goods we could ever want, endless development, the ability to communicate with anyone instantly, heck, even equal rights—without pushback. the natural order—the conservative order, one might say—would always pushback. we did not foresee the challenges to our hubris—people who don’t want to live in the western world, rampant pollution and waste, environmental degradation and climate change, social fragmentation, and illiberalism. this is an issue not so much of mindless buying and giving into consumerism, or of overlooking systemic oppression in society, but also of failing to see that we were losing. perhaps reaching too high is a touchy term, because for many of these things, it is about giving people the rights and justice they deserve. but we did, in many cases, reach out without understanding what would push us back. we failed to realize that progress isn’t natural. it’s hard.

greek mythology isn’t a story about gods being greedy or capricious. it’s a story about mortals being greedy and not understanding their limits. we can blame gods, we can blame politicians and businessmen all we want for our ills, but until we understand it is a societal issue facing us, we won’t ever truly succeed.

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‘Scattered through the deserted fields lay hoes, long mattocks and heavy grubbing-tools. These the savage women caught up and, first tearing in pieces the oxen who threatened them with their horns, they rushed back to slay the bard’

can’t believe orpheus got killed by hoes smh

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White women are a part of white supremacy and this decision by the Supreme Court is about upholding white supremacy therefore  white women are going to overwhelmingly support this because white women have always supported white supremacy. Stop pretending like white women are somehow divorced from the creation and maintenance of white supremacy (in all this variations) in this country.

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who is doing it like him