#I also forgot the name of the exact period of ancient greek greece im talking about to f

[autisticcassandracain]

So, Wonder Woman is basically Moon Knight. And of course the gods are even worse than myth ever since COIE because George Perez wanted to play the unreliable narrator trope with classical mythology. (Think Queen Hippolyta and Heracles.)

I've never read Moon Knight and know nothing about him so I don't get what you mean hy that, and I can't figure out what COIE stands for either, nor do I know what you mean when you say Perez 'wanted to play the unreliable narrator trope' (which is not a trope but a literary device, I'm sorry but I can't resist being pedantic).

That said the greek gods in the comics are in no way worse than in the myths. Like at all. It is pretty much impossible to present the gods in a fashion worse than they were in Greek Mythology. Nearly all male gods are rapists. Nearly all gods in general are vain, prone to anger, and do not tolerate anything less than uncompromising worship. Almost all gods have atrocities on their hands, though the extent of them tends to vary from myth to myth and source to source.

Something to note is that there is not really a set 'canon' to greek mythology. We have our primary sources, but they often contradict each other. A lot of our primary sources are also, in and of themselves, interpretations of stories that would've been well-known to the audience, but are unknown to us. What the gods did or didn't do is heavily dependent on the source you're reading. Euripides, in particular, is famous for casting the gods in a bad light and focusing on their flaws. He's the one who wrote The Madness of Heracles (about Hera driving Heracles to madness in which he kills his wife and kid), Hippolytus (in which Aphrodite orchestrates the murder of a man for worshipping Artemis and disdaining her; the murder involves making his stepmother fall in love with him and then having her commit suicide), etc etc. Reframing myths to put more blame on the gods (or highlight that which was already there) is hardly a Perez original. The exact role the gods did or did not play in certain tragedies in greek mythology is often in flux.

The issue with Hippolyta and Heracles' relationship is not with any mythological aspect; it's because Perez himself decided that raping someone does not mean you can't still have a romantic subplot with them.

In greek mythology, rape was almost universally glossed over and not seen as a big deal. Most if not all Greek heroes, and a lot of the gods, are rapists, and this is rarely presented as even so much as a character flaw. I am no classicist, I am not super familiar with ancient Greece's attitude towards rape at the time most myths were codified, but Ancient Athens in particular had really shitty views on women, and since Athens was the cultural center of ancient greece, this is where a lot of our primary sources come from (in particular the plays), which absolutely influences the way women were portrayed in the texts. It is not that the texts are untirely unaware that rape is bad (just like they're not entirely unaware that it sucks to be a slave), but when they choose to engage with it is highly selective. So, basically, rape was commonplace, and usually, the act of rape was not that big a deal.

This is not the case in Perez's writing. In Perez's work on Wonder Woman, rape is explicitly framed as a violent, evil act. He is clearly writing from a modern perspective, where rape is near universally condemned. But he then proceeds to handwave it anyway and write a romantic subplot between a rapist and his victim, multiple times. This is not a historical sourcetext from a long dead civilization that had wildly different values than our own; this is a modern text that should've known better. It is also not adequately explained by godly intervention (while Heracles' rage and behaviour was influenced by the gods, he wasn't outright possesed), and even if it was, this would still he a highly questionable thing to put in your writing. And even outside of Wonder Woman, Perez co-wrote the Judas Contract, which displayed a similar issue with rape apologism. His handling of mythology is not the issue here.

Once again, super not a classicist; I've never had an opportunity to study greek mythology, and my reading is limited to the Iliad, the Oresteia, the Bacchae, and assorted plays by Euripides (the guy mentioned above), as well as whatever stray academic papers I've managed to get my hands on. Notably, my knowledge of Heracles is emberassingly small. My historical knowledge is also really not impressive. I might very well be talking out of my ass here (and I'm certainly and intentionally missing nuance and detail bc I'm not getting into All That).

But to my view, while Perez's hellenic gods were hardly the most mythologically accurate, he did not make them substantiably worse than they were in myth (in fact, a lot of his gods - like Aphrodite - were portrayed as substantiably more moral). And claiming that gods in comics are portrayed as morally worse BECAUSE of perez is honestly ridiculous. The idea that someone with even a base knowledge of greek mythology wouldn't have decided to explore the fucked up aspects of the greek gods if perez hadn't gone there first is honestly ridiculous.