#Danaë

[sarafangirlart]

I want all those myth retellings where Medusa kills Perseus to have to grapple with the consequences. Perseus dies and an innocent princess is killed by a monster for her parent’s hubris and his mother is martially raped. If they’re gonna do that shit at least look the audience in the eye and tell us that Medusa’s life is somehow more precious than Andromeda’s and we should have sympathy for Medusa’s assault from a different mythology but not Danae’s fate if her son fails.

Honestly, if you know Greek tragedy it’s kinda like this, everyone has an understandable reason why they do what they do but they have to fight against each other to get what they want, there’s no scenario where everyone wins and that’s the tragedy, for example we understand why Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon but we also understand why her children hate her for it and we understand why Orestes had to kill her.

It’s understandable why Perseus had to kill Medusa, but it’s also understandable that Medusa doesn’t want to die. But Medusa retellings don’t care about the nuance of the situation, they only care about who’s right and who’s wrong.

[balkanparamo]

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

[moon-kissed-corner]

Detail from the painting Danaë (before 1829), by Jean-Baptiste Regnault.

[lesbian-iphigenia]

Why are Danaë and Iphigenia depicted together on this vase?? idk but they look cute as hell

[namarikonda]

💧 Danaë Vemente (she/her) — wood elf ranger

[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.

[cosmonautroger]

Gustav Klimt, Danaë, 1907

[sunnysidesupsstuff]

Yayayayaya happy families 🗣️

[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

[sarafangirlart]

“Even if Perseus only killed Medusa to save Danaë he still values the life of one woman over another” fucking yes??? That’s his mom??? And Medusa is not only a monster but a stranger??? Danaë sacrificed so much and been through hell and if Perseus wasn’t willing to conquer the world for her there’d be something wrong with him.

[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.

[mysterious-secret-garden]

John William Waterhouse - Danae, 1892.

Versions >> 1 | 2

[arinewman7]

Danaë

Rembrandt van Rijn

[oasisofataraxy]

the rape of danaë - tapestry

crochet medium (weight 4 acrylic yarn)

eyes: hera and/or the gods looking down upon danaë as she is raped. the red represents either evil or anger. the anger of hera as she watches her husband yet again breaks their matrimony, the anger of hera as she watches yet another child of zeus be born that is not hers. the anger of hera, the goddess of childbirth, because this is not what she is the goddess of¹.

sun: direct reference of The Morning Visitor (Dino Buzzati, 1967). the painting is of a woman who gets raped so brutally it literally deforms her.

golden flecks: the golden shower zeus came to danaë as. but notice how it encircles the sun. there is no way out. he is caging her.

brown (overall color scheme): inspired by Hozier's album Unreal Unearth: Unending. The album cover is Hozier's face (minus his mouth) covered in dirt, which is brown. This album seeped its song into my veins and now, whenever i hear of yet ANOTHER (american!) abortion issue, this lyric is all that plays: "a crying child pushes a child into the night." lives are not political. this is not freedom. we are not a "beacon of liberty."

¹ this line comes from @achillescomehome and their fic the pinnacle of civilization (is just a neat name for tyranny). show them some love <3. be angry at the scotus.

this is a sister work of my fic blood runs thicker than water (but the womb cries all the same).

[koldunia]

Danae: 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 25

Emma: 6, 9, 13, 15, 17, 25

Elle: 4, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17, 25

Fully realise there is a lot here, but I regret nothing.

THANK MEW SO MEOWCH!!! and sorry for the loooong delay, the past week's been a bit stressful ^_^'

Danaë: 7) What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them? Danaë started out in my noggin as a "mere" tomboy, and ended up a veritable butch of a knight who's been ambivalent (at best) about her own womanhood through play. It's been especially fun to play with gender change and fluidity through her (our) experiments with Vicissitude! 9) Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC? In a high-production television adaptation of my Prague by Night chronicle, Unto Ashes' cover of Don't Fear the Reaper would be playing in the background of her very violent Embrace: Come on, maiden (And she had no fear) And she ran to him (Then they started to fly) They looked backward and they said goodbye (She had become like they are) She had taken his hand (She had become like they are) Come on, maiden (Don't fear the reaper)

10) What's an AU that would be interesting to explore with your OC? Werewolf, specifically Dark Ages (again!) Werewolf, as a Shadow Lord or one of the last pre-Revenant Danislavs! 13) If you met your OC, would the two of you get along? Language barriers aside, Danaë would chide me for (amongst others): taking up too much time in the bathroom/the showers every morning (we're roommates in this hypothetical scenario), being a picky vegan, choking her/our limited shared living space out with too-heady incense and scented candles, and buying too much takeout for dinner... the list goes on for a bit here. Prolly not, tbh! :')

15) Does your OC have a faceclaim? If so, who? Yes! Anya Chalotra, whose likeness was closely captured in this lovely artwork of her by shripscapi.

17) What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise? Danaë just came back from a month-long raid of a koldun rival of her sire's a much more subdued (and internally disturbed and psychologically unstable) woman. She struggled against and ended up breaking the vow she'd previously held up against harming "those (women and children) who cannot defend themselves", itself an implicit tenet of the Road of Chivalry, but was tragically superseded by a more urgent need to fulfill her sire's cruel instructions to the letter; allowing a fellow coterie member (and Paladin) to convince her to follow through with the scorched earth tactics the elder Tzimisce had recommended for this "expedition". She tried not to prolong their suffering, of course, but the acts were wet plaster against the crackling veneers of a hardened, but ever heavy heart. She spent the next year in a self-imposed, semi-eremitical seclusion, in her ghoul Mother Monika's old anchorite cells at their shared monastic haven, as a sort of penance for those crimes.

25) What is your favorite thing about your OC? According to another player in the chronicle: "her pluck and decisiveness", and I kinda have to agree, she's one of the most hot-headed and action-oriented characters I've played so far who's not also concurrently a bimbeauxTM. I love how shounen-manga protagonist coded she feels sometimes to roleplay (of the non-heroic variety, though). -- Emma: 6) How easily could your OC be convinced to do something that goes against their moral compass? Emma is nominally independent like her Autarkis sire Eustace, who hasn't (to her spotty knowledge) taken advantage of their shared blood bond into pressuring her to do anything they'd both deem unspeakable in polite company. That same bond wears at her Humanity, though, which is currently sitting quite prettily at six.. and it shows itself most presently in her haughtily airy and fae-like demeanour around ghoul favourites and kine strangers alike. She's broken their besotted hearts at her sire's word, and tries not to follow up on the consequences -- at again, his recommendation. 9) Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC? The opener of her Roll20 bio comes from a Georg Trakl poem "From Revelation and Defeat" "…and the earth threw out a childlike body, a creature of the moon, that slowly stepped out of the darkness of my shadow, with broken arms…" I strongly associate Emma with The Moon, the 18th major arcana of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, and her many faces and phases come up quite a lot in my character studies and fics both during and outside of in-game RP. 13) If you met your OC, would the two of you get along? I'd be ordering for her at Maccas and telling them that she didn't want pickles. Despite her age, I've got a fair bit more life experience and a better (but not much) handle of my own social anxiety, especially in a big stuffy crowd of delicious humans. I hope I'd be gentle and approachable enough for her to want to reciprocate an attempt at friendship, and not as suffocatingly protective as her sire in my own reactive big sis instincts around girls who are miraculously more distressed than I am in public. 15) Does your OC have a faceclaim? If so, who? No one definitive, she's ethnically Korean, culturally Japanese and grew up in a post-WWII Australia that's still 20 years away from the repealment of the White Australian Policy. Emma is more classically feminine than I am irl, and dresses and comports herself like the classic late-50s/early-60s coquette that modern tumblr girlies spam Lana Del Rey tags with. I've saved a lot of Yuko Kitajima's art in my folder, as well as a few editorial shots of the Chinese actress Ni Ni and pioneering Japanese American ballerina Sono Osato (for her late 50s looks) -- they share that soft, but prominently femme, cultivated Nadeshiko Yamato "look" to them that Emma embodies. 17) What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise? Emma survived a particularly "fiery" Embrace that nearly claimed both hers and her sire's lives. I wrote a bit about it here :> 25) What is your favorite thing about your OC? I love her fashion sense and taste! I dressed her up in a very expensive "dream wardrobe" that I joked to my then-ST that I could only afford to play with in a make-believe game with fanciful (and fancy) vampires xD. Apart from her insane Fortuny collection, Emma is also fond of Madame Grès' designs, and wore a custom Dior dress (with that extravagant New Look silhouette) when she met and subsequently travelled with Talley on her first US visit in the early 60s. -- Elle: 4) When scared, does your OC fight, flee, freeze or fawn?

The girls are always fighting in the Sabbat, and Elle does not give the current company she keeps in the Camarilla a chance to see her in a truly vulnerable-enough state and front anything other than the same effortless bravado that she brings to every party in town. 7) What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them? Elle did not want to be a politician, much less a decorated Camarilla toady on the Primogen Council, she just needed an in after getting out of the Sabbat (and getting rid of her old pack on said way out). Her mawla (and ancestor) Talley's tacit encouragement and casual mentions of similar goings-on in NYC and Chicago spurred on her hyper-competitive side, though. 9) Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC? So many! I picked one standout from her playlist that I remember adding after an emotionally charged conversation/confession she had/received from a fellow coterie-member, a newly minted Malkavian who, between bloody crying fits, told her that he "was unable to get close to" her because she reminded him too much of the sire he's been running away from, and all but broke down when she offered to "end her permanently" for "his own benefit". An excerpt from Florence + The Machine's Dream Girl Evil: Watch me shimmer (shimmer) A projection of your mother (mother) But don't come crying (crying) I am nobody's moral center

13) If you met your OC, would the two of you get along? I think we'd have a lovely night out goth clubbing, we both love dancing, dressing up in outlandish outfits and club culture. We'd share a cig in the lounge out back that she'd not even pretend to smoke, and overshare with each other in ways only strangers in such a liminal hour and place could. I don't know if she'd text me back in the morning (or the evening after), though. :) 15) Does your OC have a faceclaim? If so, who? I've cycled amongst a few: Sora Choi, but also Ayami Nakajo and Marie Matiko for her late 90s stylings as a promising Ductus of her pack and an energetic climber of the Sabbat's own darkly cursus honorum.

17) What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise? The first "season" of our Seattle by Night chronicle ended in a high-octane bang (followed by several explosions off camera) for her. She carried her two other coterie members out of a crumbling, flaming Setite temple by her lonesome, and managed to succeed both the strength rolls and Frenzy checks to throw all three of their exhausted asses into the freezing safety of the Puget Sound below. Potence is a favoured Discipline of hers and it certainly showed up in just the right time and place. 25) What is your favorite thing about your OC? Her moral complexity, Elle is one of the darkest of the darkest grey characters I've written and played so far. She's managed, though great adversity and personal sacrifices, to wrangle herself from a Path of Enlightenment to Humanity, and ended the first season of her chronicle at an uncomfortable rating of 4 in the latter. She fought to eliminate a cannibalistic kindred cult in the same tumultuous months as she'd built up a precarious portfolio as the Seattle Slasher, the city's latest (and one of its most gruesome) serial killer. She, like Talley, preferred not to dwell on the past, and was unapologetic about who she was and where she'd come from to her coterie. She's acutely aware of her role as a model Lasombra in the city, and the first to be formally (re)admitted into its folds through a series of rigorous tests of loyalty that ended with the same "sacrifice" that her counterparts in other Camarilla domains around the country were forced to make. Her outlook from then onward very much brings to mind that scene of Marion Cotillard's Edith Piaf performing Non, je ne regrette rien on stage at the end of La Vie En Rose; Elle's betrayed and systematically erased all that she needed to of her past, and she's got nothing but the future (of Clan Lasombra moreso than her own), as uncertain as it seems, to look and strive forward to.