#Danaë

[sarafangirlart]

You can’t love Danaë while hating Perseus BUT you can love Thetis while hating Achilles, does that make sense?

[balkanparamo]

‘Danaë’ by Gustav Klimt, c. 1907-1908.

[koldunia]

Danaë of Brno, a Přemysl Revenant and Fiendish knight of Clan Tzimisce. Shaagra's worst great-great-granddaughter. My Vampire: The Dark Ages -- Prague by Night OC, painted by the wonderful Liesl @shripscapi.

[softlytowardthesun]

I’m thinking about Danaë, Perseus, and Andromeda.

Danaë was a princess, once. Her happy life was upended the day her father caught wind of a prophecy that his grandchild would be his undoing. She was imprisoned in her own home, and when her son was born, she and the baby were banished and left for dead. Yet Danaë powered through, as heroes are known to do in these types of stories. This single mother in a strange land raised her son with pride — not hubris, but true, righteous pride. They have no need of gods or monsters or the kingdom that cast them out; all mother and son need are each other.

Perseus’s call to adventure begins when yet another evil king decides to treat Danaë as an object instead of a person. Polydectes will force Danaë to marry him unless Perseus can cross the world and return with the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Perseus is in no place to protest, not when the truest hero he’s ever known is counting on him. This is not a quest for glory, but piety: the duty a child owes to their parent.

In his travels, Perseus meets Andromeda, chained to a cliffside and awaiting her grim fate. She too, has a story of a mother and child. Queen Cassiopeia foolishly offended a long list of sea gods and their kingdom will be washed away unless the gods exact their price. Cassiopeia did the offending; it should be her on the cliff. But Andromeda has to suffer for the sins of her family, just like Perseus. He chose to risk his life for his mother; Andromeda had her fate chosen for her.

Maybe Andromeda tried to talk herself into thinking her death would mean something. She’s grown up as a princess, where each generation of the dynasty is meant to be in unbroken continuity with the generation before. The crown she is presumed to wear weighs down any hopes for her own life. If Cassiopeia tells her to die, it is her duty and honor as the child to obey. Secretly, she prays that her death will mean something for her mother — that the next child she has will be granted the freedom of choice Andromeda herself never knew.

But Perseus, raised by a mother worthy of her role, knows that is bullshit. He knows Andromeda deserves better than this, and he breaks the cycle by destroying the monster and breaking her chains, will of Poseidon be damned. And when Cassiopeia reunites with her child, it’s clear she has learned nothing. She immediately tries to force Andromeda into an unhappy marriage - just like what Polydectes means to do to Danaë.

Now Andromeda and Perseus are both angry. She is ready to let her so-called family crumble. She shields her eyes, and lets her suitor and her mother meet the Gorgon’s eyes. She walks away from the stone to which she was chained, into a new life of her making.

The young couple returns to Seriphos. Perseus saves Danaë from the dread altar. A worthy king claims the throne, and in a remarkable stroke of luck for Greek mythology, Perseus kills his evil grandfather without technically violating Ancient Greece’s taboos on kin-slaying. Andromeda and Perseus ascend to the throne of Mycenae, and have that rarest thing in any myth: a happily ever after.

Andromeda gets a husband and a crown, sure, but she also gets Danaë. Danaë is everything Cassiopeia wasn’t: humble, resilient, and loving. She raised Perseus well, and she teaches Andromeda how to stand tall against monsters: not the sea beast, but the creatures that would rather offer up their own children than admit that they were in the wrong.

[eirene]

Danae Léon François Comerre

[amorphousbl0b]

Content Warning: Discussion of SA

So, many people have embraced Medusa as a symbol for sexual assault survival, and I think that’s a deeply disheartening trend. Because even accepting the Roman tale in which she is assaulted by Neptune, as is the premise of this interpretation, her means of resistance are tragic, brutal, isolating, and end in horrible violence. This tells survivors that their violation makes them a monster and the only path ahead is to submit to being one.

What makes it sadder is, in the very same story there is a woman who is assaulted by the king of the gods, who’s cast out of her home for it in the most traumatizing way, and who somehow doesn’t let that horrifying experience destroy her. She continues on and builds a life, learns to trust again, raises her son without a father to be a good person and a devoted protector, resists the approaches of a king, and finds happiness without being dependent on a man. But our culture’s idea of strength is so tied up in violent masculine expressions of power that we overlook her.

Danaë is the real hero of this story, and I’m tired of pretending she’s not.

[arinewman7]

Danaë

Rembrandt van Rijn

[go-rocksquadsfan]

Rip Perseus, you would have loved the "Thank you to my mom" sound.

[greeknerdsstuff]

Drawing of Perseus :)

[sarafangirlart]

I definitely talked about this before but the “for her beauty she was raped, for her ugliness she was murdered” always gave me the ick, it’s simply not rooted in reality. It implies that only conventionally attractive women get assaulted, which is a horrible way to view how assault works bc it’s basically stating that rape is mainly about lust, it’s not, it’s about power, it’s violating another person’s bodily autonomy to exert your power over them, anyone regardless of how beautiful or ugly they are can get raped.

It’s ironically another way Danaë is sidelined, hell in “Stone Blind” Medusa straight up rambles about how Perseus was antagonistic towards Polydectes for no reason bc he was never “actually” interested in Danaë bc she’s an older woman and single mother and she’s just not attractive, I wish I was making that up but I’m not and ppl are praising this book for how feminist it is. The fact that Danaë is an older woman matters to her story (at youngest she’d be in her mid to late 30s), back then (and even now) youth was viewed in high regard, yet Danaë isn’t youthful anymore, she’s “past her prime” so to speak but a powerful man like Polydectes still wanted to either enslave or marry her, bc again it’s not about lust it’s about power, it wouldn’t be far fetched to say that he wanted her bc she rejected him and he just couldn’t handle that, he can’t stand that a poor abandoned woman would not be interested in him, the king and wealthiest man in the island.

[7pleiades7]

Danae or Danaë (1891), (detail), by Alexandre Chantron (French, 1842-1918), oil on canvas, Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes, Rennes

[anistrange]

You Know...?

Imagine being a teenager living on an island where a idiot king like Polydectes forcefully tries to marry your mother Danaë and making impossible the live of your adoptive parents unless you accomplish a series of task that involve your death; with a sheer of luck you get rid of Medusa but then you have to rescue a princess whose mother is a pain in the ass from a sea monster, later, fighting the consort of said princess who doesn't give two shits about the well-being of Andromeda, and then rescuing your mother from Polydectes and thanking your adoptive parents with a powerful gesture of giving to them the crown of the island for the Tumblrinas to imagine you as a raging asshole and wanting you dead because D A D D Y Ovid and your pop mythology authors are always right. What a bummer.

[maggacammara]

just remembered that @danse--macabre and @fay-run both tagged me to post a WIP excerpt, so… Durgetash be upon ye.

most of my mutuals have already been tagged, but if you haven’t and you want to share some writing, you can say I tagged you ♥️

[namarikonda]

I haven't properly introduced any of my (DnD) characters, so here's a little round-up of them :')

If you ask any questions about them I will kiss you on the mouth

[noctilionoidea]

Danaë because she does not get proper appreciation for what she went through

since Perseus’ myths happen a long time before the main body of heroes I took more Minoan elements with creative liberties than usual because hey it’s art. not trying to be an accurate reflection of a historical period.

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Gustav Klimt - Danaë.