#greek mythology has some weird things going on

[wizarddaughterofathena]

Oedipus out there just being the sUpReMe one

happy Father’s Day to every mother fucker out there

[freakcliff]

iwtv universe dashboard simulator

girlmand reblogged

😶‍🌫️gaysexinthecity Follow

not saying vampires are real but i think Daniel Molloy gets way too much shit . like if i was a pulitzer prize winning journalist in my seventies and some guy called me and was like im a vampire want an interview i wouldn't hesitate either. fuck man sure tell me about being a vampire. i'll believe you

🎆 magical-swiftie

reading Interview with the Vampire rn and Claudia and Madeline are sooo Long Face core

#now that i think of it a lot of tvl's songs fit this book really well #like #'she gave me life I gave her death'??? # that's so them!!!

🏞️ girlblogg1ng

btw if you're still listening to the vampire lestat, unfollow me now. and like, seriously consider why you're giving plays to a guy who appropriates ancient egyptian history for his vampire schtick, it's honestly sickening

#the vampire lestat #tvl #maintagging because people need to see this honestly #.txt

🌄sampire

keep seeing ppl try to cancel tvl for things hes said to his fans or how he talks about ancient egyptian mythology and not that song where he talks about fucking his mother. like im not crazy right he wrote a whole song about how he fucked his mother

💟 stingorarr

"we are your children/but what do you give us/is your silence/a better gift than the truth?" sounds like it should be some ancient Greek poetry but it's literally in a song by the vampire lestat!!!

it just hits so hard... like your parents gave you nothing but maybe the truth would be more unbearable than silence...

#tvl #the vampire lestat #twmbk #those who must be kept

sampire reblogged danielmxllxy

🌫️ beatlesrpf Follow

please tell me you guys arent serious about the vampire lestat. please tell me youre not stanning a man who wrote "im an actor in my makeup, i get fatter when we break up"

#guys please #this is worse than the tortured poets department

🤖 carrieblogging Follow

Based on your likes!

Hey, Tumblr, I need a little help here?

So, my best friend has been acting a little weird lately. Like, his sleep schedule has gotten really strange (stranger than normal 😅), and I haven't seen him without sunglasses on in a week?

His diet has changed, too, like he used to always be snacking whenever I'd call him, but now he doesn't eat anything that I can see.

He even cancelled our tickets to ComicCon!! I've been waiting to meet up with him for years, and now he's just bailed on me?!? I'm mad, but honestly more worried than anything....

#carrie speaks

🌌 marbellina124

guys I think I've found the vampire Armand at the MET 😏😂

#it doesn't match the dates from the book so like #yeah #but imagine.... #parisian mutuals you have a power that can be used

interview-with-the-glampire reblogged wormyworms

🪱 wormyworms Follow

mmm tbh the only reason i *don't* believe vampires are real is because if *i* was interviewing two vampires to write a book about their life? i would not be leaving that house without their fangs in my neck and eternal life. just saying

🌇 interview-with-the-glampire

understandable but have you considered. if I went to interview two vampires and got immortality and vampire sex out of that deal I wouldn't go around letting everyone know :/

danielmxllxy reblogged sampire

🌌 marbellina124

so were all in agreement he fucked that vampire right

#oh I think he fucked AT LEAST two of those vampires #iwtv #rb

[tapwater-made-everyone-gay]

!!!SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T LISTENED TO THE VENGEANCE SAGA OF EPIC THE MUSICAL!!!

I find it really interesting that people are so upset about the Poseidon loss, using “it’s weird that a mortal beat a god” when the whole thing with gods in Greek mythology is that they’re parallels to humans. That’s why they have emotions, human anatomy, feel pain, and bleed (even if it is ichor that comes out). There are multiple cases of gods being beaten by humans, primarily demigods, but still humans—MORTALS. What makes them so powerful is their domain. Take that away? They’re practically powerless.

Poseidon is shown to be arrogant, claiming that the only reason he’s still hunting Odysseus (DESPITE killing his men, teaching his lesson, and even likely knowing about the brutal siren deaths) is because “the top dog can’t be seen letting his prey go. How else can I send the message that I’m a big dog? It’ll ruin my reputation!” He’s a cocky bastard, playing with his prey, telling Odysseus to get in the water because it’s more entertaining to him than just getting his revenge and killing him then and there. He talks like he’s never felt pain in his life and doesn’t think he ever will because “the top dog is untouchable”.

But he forgets that he needs his domain, needs his range to keep himself from losing. When Odysseus pulls the same trick with the wind bag (which he should’ve seen coming), he isn’t ready, because he’s never had to fight that fight. Odysseus has, and he has the anger to push himself farther. The god gets downed (which has happened many times with many gods as discussed earlier), and he still acts cocky. Odysseus opened the bag. He can’t leave. But that knowledge—knowledge that he’s stuck here and will eventually die anyway—allows Odysseus to make his decision. He can hurt Poseidon for as long as he’s capable of, make him suffer just as much because, hey, he’s going to die anyway, right?

Now, Poseidon has an out. He can get rid of the storm before Odysseus even lays a hand on him, let him go home, and flood Ithaca like planned. But he doesn’t, because he’s so in his own head that he doesn’t realize the position he’s in. And then Odysseus makes the first stab, and then the other. It hurts, even more because, like I said, Poseidon has probably never felt this pain before. And Odysseus doesn’t plan on stopping, not until Poseidon calls off the storm. He’ll go until his arms stop working, and if Poseidon hadn’t given in, he probably would’ve.

Poseidon can’t stop him either because the wounds are made before the others can heal. Does this punishment seem familiar? It should, because it’s the exact same one given to Prometheus by Zeus. Truthfully, it’s a punishment made for a god.

I should probably stop here because this has gone on way too long, but I do understand why some people might think it’s weird. We’re raised to believe that any god is untouchable, that they’re all-powerful and incapable of harm, especially at human hands. But that’s not Greek mythology. Gods aren’t capable of death, but they are capable of suffering, and a lot of them do. Just because the one suffering this time is one of the “big three” doesn’t mean it’s unrealistic.

Epic’s message isn’t the same as the original, and it never has been. It’s about what you’re willing to sacrifice, how far you’re willing to go for your own gain, and what the repercussions are when you do. Poseidon really kick started that message hard, and I think it’s poetic that it ends with him facing the outcome of that message himself.

Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves, but it’s not the same being on the receiving end, is it?

[t1oui]

going to school and being friends with percy jackson would be REALLY WEIRD so let's discuss it rq

he gets dropped off every day in his stepfather's car, which inexplicably has hoof prints on the hood?

the panic attacks... there's a lot of them, and nobody can even tell what's triggering them at this point

the old counselor disappears about a week into his first year at AHS (here's some cotg lore for yall) and is replaced by a weird lady who finds a way to bring percy up to every. single. student. who visits her office.

randomly disappears multiple times throughout the year

very very sea green eyes and a gray streak in his hair

once got out of the pool after swim practice and was completely dry (he insists it was a trick of the light)

the blue food obsession ofc

talks about his girlfriend annabeth all the time... even his friends are convinced it's a "my canadian girlfriend" situation bc he never calls her. he doesn't even have a PHONE

always carries around a pen in his pocket and even though it's just a shitty old ballpoint, NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO TOUCH IT. also he never uses it. ever.

every teacher has sent an email with their concerns about him to the counselor and when that doesn't work to his parents. the responses are always very awkward and vague

talks about his bio dad a lot... never explicitly negative but bro clearly has daddy issues lol

will sometimes randomly mention camp/war/gods and then brush it off like it never happened

absolutely vibrated in his seat the entirety of the greek mythology unit... told the teacher "a demigod named perseus fought ares once" and the teacher just assumes he means the og (aka the one he's named after)

that one upbeat popular guy everybody knows absolutely nothing about, his friends included

they probably have a spreadsheet with all the info they actually DO know about him

finds a way to brag about his mom in every conversation no matter how irrelevant... his friends are used to it atp

everyone's so used to seeing him smiling and laughing that when, say, he catches a younger kid being bullied, it's actually terrifying to see how angry he gets. everybody in that hallway gets chills

there's something off about him and nobody can tell what. that's just how he is

sometimes weird people in weird outfits are hanging around the school and they're ALWAYS looking for him.

every time someone asks what college he's going to he gives a different answer or straight up avoids answering so nobody actually knows

(if he says a school and someone is like "omg me too" he changes his answer right then and there lol... he's like "oh nvm i forgot i'm actually going here my bad" and the person is so confused)

nobody ever sees him working on college applications but he complains about having to do them all the time... bro is like "yeah i had to go through a sewer system but at least my girlfriend and my best friend were there" and his friends are like yo HUH

never explains anything he says

presentation night presentation = all the shittiest things my family has done and he's laughing about it but wdym your aunt kidnapped you and gave you amnesia???

sometimes he's getting fed up with a teacher or another student and a pipe randomly bursts in the school. like it's weird how often his anger ends in a plumber being called when he's nowhere near the problem

where everyone else is excited to watch a movie and chill in class, percy complains through the entirety of hercules - not just "oh this movie sucks", more like "god hercules is such a dick, idk why they made him chill in this movie"

the weirdest part is how, when percy complains about zeus being a good dad in the movie, it starts thundering outside

nobody can keep track of how many schools he's been to at this point... there's a whole section of the spreadsheet for this

when percy's friends finally meet annabeth they are SHOOK bc they truly did not think this girl was real

alright i can't think of anything else but if i DO i will add on later

[ckret2]

Why do you ship billford? i want to hear all ur handcanons and reasons hehehe

ALL of them? My friend I do not think you comprehend the magnitude of the task you have requested. I can tell you some of them.

Here's a post I already wrote listing why I like them, and here's a post about what Ford thinks about Bill, and I just made a post about what Bill thinks about Ford because I've had it typed up on discord for ages and decided it needs its own post.

So, some headcanons:

⭐️ While most people who ship it headcanon that they had a romantic relationship of some kind pre-betrayal, my default headcanon is that they DIDN'T have a relationship—mainly because I enjoy making Bill, specifically, miserable, and I like headcanoning that Ford violently lost interest in Bill at the EXACT moment Bill developed a sincere interest in Ford.

Meaning that Bill "LOOKS LIKE MR. BRAINIAC FINALLY GOT SMART" Cipher destroyed his own chances five seconds before going "no no wait I actually want to keep this one," and that's SO funny. I made a graph!

⭐️ From Lost Legends we know that Ford used to date a siren. In the original Greek mythology, sirens didn't woo sailors by singing prettily; sirens offered knowledge about distant and future events. Sailors wrecked their ship upon the sirens' shores and starved to death at their feet just to listen to them sing about the secrets of the universe.

What I'm saying is: Ford has a type.

⭐️ This is a mutual monsterfucker 4 monsterfucker relationship. They look at each other and go "wow you're such a weird-looking alien" and they're attracted to each other BECAUSE of that, not in spite of that. I don't want any of this "oh how could I be drawn to something so strange..." shame out of Ford, as far as I'm concerned his first crush was Mothra, a floating triangle is nothing.

⭐️ Consequently, this means that if you take an AU where Bill gets stuffed in a human body, rather than making things easier, it ironically means that any PHYSICAL attraction Ford had for Bill instantly evaporates. A humanized Bill could be the sexiest damn thing in the room and everyone else in the vicinity is going 🥵💦 but Ford's going 😐. If they hook up with Bill in a human body it's in spite of Bill's current appearance and it's because Ford knows that, underneath the body, Bill's still Bill. You could hand Ford a perfect Tumblr Sexyman supermodel and he'll be fantasizing about a three-tiered pyramid with more teeth than a shark.

⭐️ Bill WILL play Dungeons Dungeons & More Dungeons with Ford, voluntarily, for fun. However he always wants to DM and he's brutal.

⭐️ I think that the majority of the Henchmaniacs used to be like Ford: young, naive, USEFUL aliens that Bill was trying to manipulate into getting access to their universes, probably by trying to get THEM to build portals. None succeeded, but they got far enough along that either they chose to join Bill, they were forced to flee their dimension and join Bill—or, due to Bill, their home no longer existed, so they might as well join him. I think that every one of them was once his ✨favorite✨ person. I think he sealed the deal in winning their friendship & loyalty with a calculated, scripted display of vulnerability—the exact same one he tried to use on Ford: I liberated my constricting, flat world; I want to liberate yours...

He may have dated some of them, too, especially right after they joined. Because he wouldn't have recruited them unless he thought they were JUST ♥ LIKE ♥ HIM. They're special, they're important...

... and after a few years, Bill realizes they're not that much like him after all and loses interest, and they sink down into the rank-and-file with the rest of the Henchmaniacs. The Henchmaniacs are FULL of people who were once Bill's Favorite—his best friends, his confidants, his lovers—and most of them are desperate to catch his eye and be that important to him again. They gave everything they had to Bill only for Bill to get bored.

So when he shows off the human who enabled Weirdmageddon and invites him to join the gang, they know EXACTLY what they're looking at: Bill's newest favorite. They know how this goes, he'll be gaga over this earthling for the next 5 to 500 years and then Ford will be just another regular Henchmaniac. The fact that Ford doesn't seem eager to join is no problem. Ford isn't the only soon-to-be Henchmaniac whose world Bill ended; some of them had to be talked around into joining, too.

⭐️ I think that, if you took Bill with his canon personality, didn't give him any character development, and then made him GENUINELY fall in love with Ford, and had him SINCERELY try his hardest to be a good, loving, healthy partner... he would still be toxic as hell for Ford.

Part of what draws Bill to Ford is that he sees SO much of himself in Ford—some accurate, some just projection. (You who crave power and fame and fortune like I do; you who also hunger to be all-knowing; you who would also sacrifice your world and your family and everyone you know and love to get what you want; you with an ego the size of the moon, oh, you deserve an ego the size of a star.) And so he assumes that what Ford really wants is what BILL would want in Ford's shoes.

And if Bill was Ford, what he'd want is to REALLY be the man who changed the world. Bill thinks he's fulfilling all Ford's wildest dreams if he gives that to him. Naming Ford the orchestrator of Weirdmageddon is the most generous gift Bill could ever offer.

Even if Bill is Really Really Trying and accepts that okay Ford doesn't want his world invaded: his idea of showing Ford love will be pulling the strings to get Ford fame & fortune. Teach him secrets of the universe that he can publish in a dozen groundbreaking scientific papers, arrange meetings with politicians and celebrities, get him a Nobel, get him an Oscar-winning bio pic, get him a billion dollars, get him EVERYTHING Ford's ever imagined as a marker of success and then double it.

When Bill's manipulating Ford, he offers praise and approval in little drops periodically leaking from the faucet, to keep Ford thirsty for more. When Bill's LOVING Ford, he just breaks the fire hydrant and lets it flood the street.

But the thing is, that's not good for Ford. That'll never make him truly happy. Ford's only ever learned how to measure his success by external markers, but the more external markers he collects the more he'll feel like he hasn't Made It yet. It's even possible that knowing Bill's helped him get this far will make him feel like he hasn't really EARNED it. He could have the whole world handed to him and he'll feel just as dissatisfied as he was on the day he first summoned Bill.

And Bill, even if he's trying his HARDEST to do this right, wouldn't be able to understand why this isn't working. A trillion years old and the only way he knows how to show love (or to receive love) is by showering someone in praise and gifts and favors. If that doesn't work, he doesn't know what's left.

[kebriones]

Hey just letting you know that @/margaretkart is a racist and apparently some kind of modern greek supremacist. She plays the victim and acts as if Greek people are an oppressed minority in the world and refuses to acknowledge that race is a post colonial construct. Race as we know it did not exist during ancient times. She for some reason also is convinced that the worst thing in the world is having a person of color play a fictional Greek mythological character. God forbid the “purity” of Ancient Greek mythology becomes sullied by—gasp!—a Percy Jackson show. The Ancient Greek gods were the gods of all the people on earth like come on. That includes people of color.

1. What is the point of this ask. To inform me? It could've been done privately or out of anon. If you have issues with someone, block them or talk to them about it. Do not do this. Also why mention this person when there are many greek people on tumblr who hold very similar opinions? If you wanted to talk about the issue in general it would've been better to not mention one specific person. I haven't even seen this person mentioning this topic, but I have seen it before by other greek people here.

2. I've argued about this topic with fellow greek people publicly online here, in private talks and in real life. I am a firm believer that actors who play in movies as well as theater do not have to match anything from age to gender to appearance to origins of the character they're playing. Have I still complained that helen in the movie troy looks way too german? Yes. So do I understand where this sensitivity stems from? Yes. The systematic approach of ancient greek culture being a free for all for western countries while ignoring modern greek identity and how, for better or for worse, tied it is to the ancient culture, is an issue. I still think it's up to us to put ourselves in this narrative rather than complain that foreigners aren't catering to us.

3. I feel like describing someone as a racist and a "supremacist" over this is a little bit in bad faith. I have not had talks about this topic with this person, I don't care to have extensive talks about this topic in fucking general anymore because it's stupid and I know other people who feel that way and I'm not some morality police to go out of my way to go call them out. When the discussion reaches me, and when I'm talking for myself, I will say what I think. The way the discussion of race is online is so weird to me anyway. It's all way too saturated by current convoluted US ideas and I am not equipped to help detangle the mess for others.

4. Do I think that it's way more realistic for a movie about, say, classical era greece to have a character that looks to be of african origin than a character that looks Scandinavian? Absolutely. Did the actor that played Achilles in Troy:Fall of a city bother me? No, it's an actor playing a role, of an imaginary character no less. What bothered me was that he didn't have long hair, because hair was a very significant cultural element at the time, and his hair is used in the story. The same exact issue that I had with the actor that played hector in that series, who also didnt really look like a person from that area realistically, but who was otherwise very good at his role.

5. As for playing the victim and oppressed minorities: while i would not go so far as to use "oppressed minority" for the greeks of the diaspora, it's very real that modern greeks have been looked down at by westerners, historically. Do I think this justifies or has anything to do with being bothered about what actors who play ancient greek mythology characters look like or come from, in a foreign piece of art no less? No. But it's still a thing.

6. I am extremely stressed out and busy today but I still took time to answer this because i need to say again, please don't do this. If you want to help people to see things differently and maybe move away from biases, talk to Them. Just because I'm following someone or interacting with them online, it doesn't mean I'm endorsing or agreeing with or even KNOW everything they think and say and believe. I avoid reading posts from fellow greeks that are complaining about these things because i think it's an overreaction and I think we need to tackle deep and actual cultural problems that WE have ourselves and not care too much about what some Hollywood movie is doing. Whatever. Tired discussion.

7. Percy Jackson sucks and I do hate that it's based on anc greek mythology but I just don't interact with it. The fact that it is a generation's first taste of anc. gr mythology and thus has had an impact on their perception of it is true and important though. The same way it bothers me when all people know of the odyssey is epic the musical. But still, whatever. Some greek people might be more bothered by it all and need to talk about it online and I think that's perfectly okay and valid. I do my petty complaining now and then too.

8. "The ancient greek gods were the gods of all people one earth" you can say that of other mythologies that have an origin of the entire human race as part of their myths, that's how religions usually go. These gods were worshipped in specific areas in a specific time and the mythology was created by specific cultures of specific areas. This is a major complaint that greek people have, which I mentioned before, that this specific ancient culture's mythology is treated as a thing detached from the actual culture, the ancient one, and from its inheritors which happen to be the people that live here and/or have this specific cultural identity. I don't think this cultural identity has anything to do with the appearance of people, and we all know the greek identity has absolutely nothing to do with race and that's a very fundamental part of it.

9. I would try to make myself even clearer but I don't have time and I didn't want to leave this unanswered even though I also kinda wanted to because this type of anon ask does nothing good for anyone and I encourage you to engage with others in a way that is understanding and comes from a place of wanting everything to be better and kinder. And there's so so much you will disagree with, on fundamental levels, with other people online, if only because we all come from very different cultures with different values and upbringings, despite how it looks like we're all in a US-based melting pot. You have to make peace with that, and it can be difficult. I've had American friends that I deeply disagree with on important stuff, and I had to face the discomfort and take time to let myself understand that our cultures are different.

Anyways. I apologize in advance if anything i said makes no sense or is insensitive or condescending. I admit i was upset when I started my reply but if you want to discuss this further we can absolutely do that. I cannot reply privately to anon asks otherwise i would have. I hate call-out style stuff like this because they do nothing good.

[thesummerstorms]

PJO x DC, Camp Half-Blood has an open betting pool on:

Is Poison Ivy actually a dryad or, like, the dryad+human equivalent of a demigod?

Is Black Canary a daughter of Apollo? (Blond + sonic scream) Or is her boyfriend Green Arrow (blond+ archer) the son of Apollo?

Are the Arrow sidekicks then legacies? Some of them are too old to be Canary or Green Arrow's biokogical kids, but...

No one will entertain the idea of both Green Arrow and Black Canary being Apollo kids or even one of them being a legacy because it's widely known they're together and no one wants to go there, Greek Mythology be damned.

Which gods could still fight in a space battle? (Apollo and Artemis are the sun and moon, but does Poseidon have any dominion once you leave Earth's atmosphere? What about someone whose powers are more rooted in humanity, like Hermes?)

They have this debate under the guise of "which god's kids" to avoid anyone being smites, but everyone understands the subtext.

If they ran away and, like, joined the Green Lanterns though, would they finally get to escape demigod problems? Or would the Gods still follow them?

What the hell is Swamp Thing, and does Pan have anything to do with it? Did some poor Satyr 's nature magic go really, really wrong?

Batman son of Nyx? Nemesis? Athena? Phobos or Deimos?

Annabeth Wayne Chase tends to shut those conversations down when she can, or else leave the room, and people figure she has some weird Gothamite grudge, maybe related to Batman not helping her when she was a seven year old run away. This theory has extra credence because she will throw something sharp or heavy at you if you try and insist Batman must be her older brother through Athena.

Do alien pantheons (Rao, X'Hal) really exist, and, more importantly, do they now have any domains on Earth due to Superman, Starfire, etc.

What exactly is going on with Aquaman, Tempest, etc & Poseidon. (Percy tried to give them the explanation but it was too rational to be fun.)

Are any of their missing or presumed dead siblings actually running around in a mask with the Justice League?

Everyone is pretty sure they know the answer to this, actually, at least in their heart of hearts. It never stops the youngest kids from hoping.

Bonus:

Roy Harper /Arsenal encounters either Will Solace or some other blond Apollo child with both archery ability (at least somewhat) and sound powers (a la Will's sonic whistle) and becomes paranoid that Dinah and Ollie have either a time traveling or dimension traveling secret love child.

[genericpuff]

All That Glitters is Not Feminism - An Analysis of LO's Brand of "Feminism" and What Remains of its Fanbase (A Prologue)

So I referenced a certain article in a recent reblog/ask response and I just need to talk about it because what the actual fuck-

This has to have been written by either a bot or a hater who's reached peak god tier level at playing the long con sarcasm game because NOTHING about this feels sincere or even factual. Much of it almost has to be read in a mocking tone for it to make any real sense.

It says "Lore Olympus" (literally in quotations) in just about every single paragraph over and over again and every single talking point revolves EXCLUSIVELY around Persephone, which I suppose comes as no surprise considering that seems to be all the comic - and its fanbase - cares about at this point.

I really love (/s) how Persephone's "evolution" is being naive and then 'blossoming' into an independent woman who relies entirely on the rich man who groomed her to solve all her problems.

Also all she's done since becoming Queen of the Underworld is abuse lower class people. That's the stuff feminist dreams are made of <3

While we're talking about the main leads, "poster child" is definitely a word for Hades, I think a more appropriate term would be "literal child". And boy howdy, 'god of consent' sure is a title to give the guy who ripped out a lower class satyr's eyeball and beat him half to death.

This man owns slaves, btw. And both he and his "powerful wife" are equally horrible to lower class people, especially women.

This is hands-down the funniest section of the article and we're only three bullet points in.

Thetis and Persephone have never even so much as spoken one word to each other outside of the courtroom that Thetis technically put her in after plotting against her for an entire season.

Eros is a man. Nothing wrong with that but it comes with the unintentional icky hilarity of implying that because Eros is the gay best friend, that means he's a woman.

They literally don't read this fucking comic-

Everyone always relies on this weird talking point of Demeter not being able to "let Persephone go"... y'all, she just didn't want Persephone to outright move to Olympus, she wanted her to commute. That was it! That was literally the only problem! She wasn't preventing Persephone from pursuing a higher education or telling her she wasn't allowed to work, she literally fucking encouraged it! And with the added later context of Persephone killing a bunch of mortals - and, ironically, the fact that Persephone was assaulted/put in harm's way by TWO SEPARATE MEN in the first two days of her time in Olympus - yeah, I don't blame Demeter for not wanting her daughter to move cold turkey actually LOL

Also hilarious that they claim Rachel has turned "tradition" into "innovation" when the only thing she's managed to do is set back modern feminism in her young adult readers by 80 years and re-establish misogynist brainwashing in her adult ones. Rachel, your fanbase was literally shipping a victim of abuse with her abuser just a few days ago.

oh boy this is uh

this is some cult shit ngl

and the "rewriting the script of Greek mythology" part is VERY concerning knowing what we know about Lore Olympus and who it was written by. This is literally cultural appropriation, full stop, and it exists because Lore Olympus - and works like it, made by people like Rachel - exists.

I can't even commit to the original theory that this was written by a bot because it all feels very pointed and intenetional. This is being written by someone who, at the very least, REALLY sucks at media analysis and writing, because the entire article is just "Lore Olympus, buzzword, Lore Olympus, buzzword, buzzword, Lore Olympus", it's like a white knight incantation for guilty virtue signallers who have zero clue what they're talking about. And at worst, yes, it's appropriation from someone who doesn't mind taking a culture's stories and myths and promoting their erasure by people outside of the culture like Rachel.

And that's it, that's literally the article lmao

*EDIT: There was a section here before addressing the writer of the article from a very opinionated POV that, while isn't unusual for what I do here, did feel necessary to remove after I was contacted by the article writer who addressed the flaws in their original article and is now seeking to correct them with revisions/an article rewrite. So I felt it only fair as a compromise to at least remove that section as it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with this post as a whole and can be removed without entirely ruining the flow of this analysis. If/when that article is rewritten, I'll be revisiting this post and my overall analysis !

And honestly, it's all really telling, because this does accurately reflect the state of the LO fanbase.

Not only do many of the people who defend this comic like it's their job not pick up on the blatant misogynist tones that are going on in its narrative (I can't even call them "undertones" anymore, they're no longer that subtle) but whether or not they even read the comic at all is up for debate with how much stuff they tend to get wrong in their own arguments and justifications. And this is something that's VERY regularly seen in the fanbase discussions, readers will constantly be unaware of things that happened because they skimmed through it at lightning speed just to see if Hades and Persephone kiss and so they can get the top comment on Webtoons so they can be "ahead of the fanbase". It's no wonder that Rachel has gotten used to getting away with retconning things because her fanbase didn't even read what she established the first time.

Rachel's fanbase was literally defending the romance ship of an abuser and his victim on the newest FP episode preview. When that FP episode came out two nights ago and Hera said, point blank, that he didn't love her but abused her, I could only think of that portion of the fanbase who was very audibly simping over Kronos in the IG comment section. Are they actually having their moment of shameful clarity now? Or are they just gonna move the goalposts and pretend that didn't happen?

I don't want to say anything bad about Shelby here because she really seems like she's fighting for her life on this site that she's trying to get off the ground, but a lot of her other articles also come across as very one-note while being peppered with buzzwords that make it seem like what she's talking about is "progressive" when it really isn't. Case in point, Lessons in Chemistry has been commonly criticized for not actually appealing to the demographic that its Mary Sue-ish main character is supposed to represent - women in STEM career fields.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Lore Olympus is not 'feminism', it's white feminism that is designed to appeal to predominantly heterocis white women who think the solution to misogyny is to willingly submit to it and accept the status quo - that it's "empowering" if the woman is smiling and having all her needs paid for by a man. Sure, I can accept that different women will be looking for different relationship dynamics, some women genuinely are happy being in a relationship where they support their husbands first and foremost. But can that truly be called feminism? Or is the real feminism the choices we make along the way that we should be given the freedom to make?

It says a lot about the folks who tend to regularly prop up LO on a pedestal like this as some "revolution in feminism" despite the contrary after spending more than just 30 seconds skimming the attention-grabbing art, and Shelby is just one of many. She's not the worst of the bunch, though.

That goes to someone else who I want to give proper light to in their own essay. Someone who definitely earned a good stern talking-to this past week and has, thankfully, had consequences dished out to her for her horrible actions towards queer POC writers.

If you know, you know. If you don't, buckle up.

[comicaurora]

Have you ever notices the weird trait that a lot of the mytic Greek monsters are decendents, or otherwise related to posiden (all sea beasts, cyclops, medusa, minotaur ect) were mostly slain by children of zeus? The rest of the mytic Greek hero's mostly slayed children of typhon and echidna.

Do you think this is somthing to do with the fact that posiden used to the ruler of mychnain pantheon, and zuse took over, so the mytology reflected this by having posiden monster children slain by the heroic children of zeus?

Have you ever noticed any similar patters in mythology involving the chainge of the dominat god?

It's hard to say! The Mycenaean pantheon is very poorly understood since we don't have anything like the corpus of literature we have from Archaic Greece, and as far as I can tell it's mostly been reconstructed from ledgers and the equivalent of receipts - this many jars of stuff to the temple of this god in this region, etc etc. And the idea that Poseidon was central - while apparently widely accepted - doesn't really tell us how Poseidon was characterized back in those days, or how (or if) things shifted to be Zeus-centric later on.

And in the broad scale, it's hard to know for sure if a pantheon's myths reflect an actual shift in what the dominant/central god being worshipped was, or if something else was going on. Mythology rarely maps one-to-one to the historical events it was running in parallel to. There are lots of mythologies with god wars or former leaders of the gods being replaced - Tyr with Odin, Nuada with Lugh, Ra getting merged with a half-dozen different gods to give them his oomph and authority at various times - and it's not clear when a god conflict reflects a real religious shift in who's being worshipped and when it's something else. For instance, classical Greek mythology has loads of themes of sons usurping fathers, starting with Kronos usurping Ouranos and followed by Zeus usurping Kronos - but it doesn't seem like Kronos was historically worshipped in the time before Zeus or anything that simple and clean. Kronos doesn't seem to pre-exist that space of mythology at all.

However, there are tidbits in Greek mythology where a god kills a monster and takes up residence in their place of power, like Apollo killing Python - a monstrous child of Gaia that seems to have potentially been actually worshipped for oracular reasons before Apollo showed up and took over, which would make it a mythical parallel to a real shift in local religious practices. Although again, that is very hard to confirm (and some of the researchers who think that seem to wanna believe it because it very conveniently lets them tie it in with the bible)

this kind of thing is why the deep-dives are my favorite kind of nightmare to subject myself to

So it's hard to say if a myth of a conflict between gods reflects a real-world conflict between religious practices, but all that said, that is a very interesting pattern to note - that Poseidon is more consistently a father of monsters, while Zeus is almost universally a father of heroes.

[prolibytherium]

I never touched it but I feel like i only ever hear positive things said about song of achilles.. in (rough strokes at least) what makes it dogshit to you?

Okay it's been a while since I actually read it so some of this might not be spot on accurate. Sorry if at any point I say 'the book never does xyz' and it actually does once or twice but I think my underlying criticisms are accurate

-Patroclus is made into like this soft gentle tender quivering little yaoi boy. In the source text, he's shown as compassionate and moved by the suffering of his own men (and apparently having some medical skill, tending to the wounded in the camp), but very much invested n combat and very, very good at it (pages worth of descriptions of the guys he's killing left and right). In this, the arguably more complex character from this 8th century BC text is flattened into Being A Healer, he doesn't want to go to war he just wants to help people, he only goes because Achilles has to but he doesn't want to fight he's a HEALER he's a gentle lover NOT A FIGHTER who just wants to help he just wants to help everyone around him he HEALS while Achilles is a doomed warrior who is so good at fighting and KILLING its a DICHOTOMY GUYS!!!LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SUN AND MOON DOOMED LOVERS SO SAD patocluse HEALER . (I Think he's specifically characterized as being BAD at fighting but might be misremembering)

-I don't remember much about Achilles' characterization I think it just makes him less of a jackass while not adding anything of interest and levels out into being mad boring.

-Not getting into the literal millenias old debate whether the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus were being characterized as some type of lover by the original oral sources of the Iliad or its Homeric writers. We will never know. We don't even know what (if any) culturally accepted conventions of male homosexuality existed in bronze age Greece (we know much more about their descendants). But there are some interesting elements of their characterization in this direction, with how unconventional their relationship is WITHIN the text itself- Patroclus is described as cooking for Achilles and his guests (very specifically a woman/wife's job), Achilles chides Patroclus like a father, but there's also scene where Achilles' mourning of him directly echoes a passage of Hector's wife mourning her husband, Patroclus is explicitly stated to Achilles' elder, and is overall treated as his equal or near-equal, closest confidant and most beloved friend (to the point that pederastic classical Greeks would debate over who was erastes (older authority figure lover) and who was eromenos (adolescent 'beloved')- many took it as a given that this text depicted their present-day cultural norms of homosexual behavior but it existed so Outside of these norms that it had to be debated who was who). Their relationship is non-standard both within the text and to the descendants of the civilization that wrote them.

Basically what I'm saying is this book had opportunities to like, explore the unconventionality of the relationship (being presented here as explicitly lovers), explore the dynamics of why Patroclus wants to do 'women's work' (besides being a tenderhearted softboy), the weird dynamics where they take on paternal roles to each other but also roles of wives, how they feel about being this way, and just kind of Doesn't. Which I guess isn't an intrinsic fault (because it omits much of what I just talked about to begin with). it's just like.... Lame. This book takes jsut abandons everything interesting about the source text in favor of flattening it into bland Doomed Yaoi.

-The conflict that sets off the core story of the Iliad is Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over Briseis, an enslaved Trojan woman taken by Achilles as a war-trophy, Achilles spends most of the story moping because he was dishonored by his 'trophy' being taken. Achilles and Patroclus and everyone else are raping their captives, all the women in the story are either captured Trojans (or in the case of the free women within the walls of Troy, soon to be enslaved, and are slave owners themselves). Slavery as an institution and extreme patriarchal conventions are innate to the text and reflective of the context in which it was developed. You cannot avoid it.

But obviously you can't have your soft yaoi boys doing this, so the author has them capturing women to Protect Them from the other men. Their slaves are UNDER THEIR PROTECTION and VERY SAFE (and they might even Like And Befriend Them but I might be misremembering that. Briseis does though). Our heroes have apparently absorbed none of the ideals of the culture they exist in and the author seems to think "they're gay and aren't sexually attracted to their captives" would translate to them being outright benevolent (also as if wartime sexual violence is just about attraction and not part of a wider spectrum of violent acts to dehumanize and brutalize an accepted 'enemy')

In the source text, Briseis mourns Patroclus as being the kindest to her of her captors, who tried to get her a slightly better outcome by getting her married to Achilles (which probably would be the Least Bad of all possible outcomes for a woman in that situation, becoming a legal wife instead of a slave), and wonders what will happen to her now that he's gone. This is a really really sad, horrible, and compelling dynamic which could be fleshed out in very interesting ways but is instead is tossed entirely aside in favor of them being Besties. Like brother and sister.

All of the above pisses me off so much. If you don't want to engage in the icky parts of ancient/bronze age Greece then don't write a retelling of a story taking place in bronze age Greece. I'm not gonna get mad at children's adaptations of Greek myths or silly fun stories loosely based on them for omitting the rape and slavery but it is SO fundamental to the Iliad. If you're not willing to handle it, either fully omit it or better yet set your Iliad inspired yaoi in an invented swords-and-sandals setting where you can have all your heartbreaking tragic doomed lovers plot beats and not have to clumsily write around the women they're brutalizing.

-The author didn't seem to know what to do with Thetis and she made her just like, Achilles bitch mother who spends most of the story trying to separate our Yaoi Boys (iirc her disguising Achilles as a girl and hiding him on Scyros is made to be more about getting him away from Patroclus than trying to save her son from his prophesied doom in the Trojan War) until she sees how much they loooove each other and I think helps Patroclus' spirit get to the afterlife or something in the end?

-This is more of a personal taste gripe but it has that writing style I loathe where the prose feels less like a story and more like an attempt to string together Deep Beautiful Hard Hitting Poetic Lines that will look great as excerpts on booktok (might predate booktok but same vibe). It's all very Pretty and Haunting and Deep but feels devoid of real substance.

I really like The Iliad and The Odyssey in of themselves. They're fascinating historical texts that give a window into how 8th century BC Greeks told their stories, saw their world, interpreted their ancestors, etc. And genuinely I think these texts have 'good' characters, there's a lot of complexity and humanity to it.

WRT the Iliad- all of the main Achaeans are pretty fascinating, the one singular part where Briseis Gets To Talk and laments her situation is great, Achilles fantasizing that all of the Trojans AND the Achaeans die so he and Patroclus alone can have the glory of conquering Troy (wild), Achilles asking to embrace Patroclus' shade and reaching out for him but it's immaterial (and the shade being sucked back underground with a 'squeak' (the squeak kinda gets me it's disturbing and sad)), Hecuba talking about wanting to tear out Achilles' liver and eat it in a (taboo, exceptioally pointed) expression of rage and grief for his mutilation of her son's corpse, just one tiny line where the enslaved women performing ritual wailing for their dead captors are described as using it as an outlet to 'grieve for their own troubles' is heartrending, etc. A lot of grappling with anger and grief and the inevitability of death, a lot of groundwork laid for characters that could be very interesting when expanded upon in the framework of a conventional novel.

And Song Of Achilles really doesn't do much with all that. I know a lot of my gripes here are kind of just "It's different from the Iliad", I would have thought of it as mostly mediocre and forgettable rather than infuriating if it wasn't a retelling (and I DEFINITELY have strong biases here). But I think the ways in which it is different are less just a product of a retelling (of course there's going to be omissions and differences) and more a complete and utter disinterest in vast majority of its own subject matter, to the book's detriment. I think a retelling has a point when it EXPANDS on the source, or provides a NEW ANGLE to the source. This book doesn't Really do either, it just shaves off the complexity of its source material, renders the characters into a really boring archetype of a gay relationship, and gives very little else. Its content boils down to a middling tragic romance that has been inserted into the hollowed out defleshed skeleton of the Iliad.

Bottom line: I definitely would not be as mad about it if I wasn't familiar with the source material but I think it's fair to expect a retelling to Engage with/expand on its source, and I also think it's weak purely on its own merits. This book was set up to disappoint Me specifically.

[traegorn]

Hey-o! Tis the season for people to talk about how the holidays were "actually pagan" and I'm on the hunt for sources about how that's really not the case, if you have any you'd recommend!

Okay, so the problem is there are so many weird "Christmas is stolen!" bullshit memes going around, it's so hard to just give you a comprehensive list of sources. Christmas celebrations have evolved as the religion has spread, and different things come from different times...

The key here is to go for academic sources. This is a question of history, and a well supported historical research is going to tell you whether they're operating from primary, secondary or tertiary sources.

So while I can't give you a simple list, let me give you a couple of examples off the top of my head and give you tips on how to investigate any the dumb claims that get passed around.

Christmas being in December: So a lot of people go for the "Christmas is in December so it can steal from [INSERT SOLSTICE CELBRATION]" is ahistorical... because we know exactly why Christmas is in December. Because the guys who made the decision argued with each other and left behind written documentation. The two big names you need to look up are  Clement of Alexandria (who pitched January 6th) and Hippolytus of Rome (who proposed December 25th). This is around the turn of the third century, and you can find both of their writings. Some folks have questioned the authenticity of some of Hippolytus of Rome's writings, but Clement of Alexandria's seem well supported. These were internal arguments about when the birth of Christ took place within the early church, and when they settled on late December. There are reasons for this, and you can read their arguments (it largely has to do with the importance of when Jesus was conceived -- they wanted that to be an important date and then added nine months to it). Importantly though, because linear time is a thing, this means Christmas was set in December before the Christianization of the Germanic and Norse tribes... so anyone who says Christmas was set to December to correspond with Yule doesn't understand the concept of "coincidences."

The Christmas Tree: The Christmas tree was invented in 16th century Germany. That's... that's just written down all over the place. Now, there are legends about Martin Luther being the first who did it -- but I'm pretty certain that's just an embellishment that got added on. There are preceding traditions where part of an evergreen was brought into the home as a part of solstice traditions (though some will claim the Egyptians did this? Which is wild -- likely misinterpreting their use of palm fronds as the same thing), but the act of taking a whole ass tree, cutting it down, putting it in your house, and decorating it? That's 16th century Germany all the way. You can rabbit hole so many sources on that one, but honestly just pick apart the citations on the Wikipedia page. Putting a branch in your house and dragging a whole tree in are very different acts.

Jesus's story is copied from [INSERT RANDOM GOD]: There are so many of these, and some are just downright disrespectful to major world religions (the Krishna version of the meme especially). The answer is... just see if what the meme is saying about the god is supported by the mythology. Like I've seen ones that says Dionysus was "born of a virgin." If you know anything about the Greek gods, you're probably already laughing on the floor. Horus gets dragged into this too, because Gerald Massey was trying to pull a "White Goddess but with Dudes." But any serious research on Horus will tell you the supposed parallels aren't supported by the mythology.

So sorry, this wasn't so much sources you can use as it is how to look for them to begin with. Because there's just so, so much. This isn't even covering cases of syncretism, where pre-existing cultural traditions got continued post-Christianization. Because it's almost always the case that if a pre-Christian practice endured post Christianization, it's because people decided to keep doing it -- not because the church was trying to "steal" it. The latter means there was some mustache twirling plan behind it, when the former means (usually) the church went "Well, they're paying their tithes and saying it's for Jesus, so who gives a shit?"

I'm just going to finish this off with linking to my podcast episode on this, along with Ocean Keltoi's great Yule video on the topic. Hopefully that helps.

[cynicalclairvoyantcadaver]

Oh my god, ok listen, I need to fucking vent.

I'm rereading PJO and I'm reminded of how much I hate how Rick portrayed Ares in Percy Jackson.

A BULLY? A THIEF? A CRIMINAL?

YOU KNOW WHAT RICK DOES TO ARES? HE TURNS HIM INTO THE BULLY WHO GIVES KIDS WEDGIES, WHO TEASES YOU AND STEALS YOUR LUNCH MONEY.

AND THAT'S FUCKING WRONG, BECAUSE ARES IS NONE OF THAT!

ARES IS THE GOD YOU PRAY TO TO GIVE YOU THE STRENGTH TO FIGHT AGAINST THE BLOODY FATHERFUCKERS AND DICKSUCKERS. HE'S THE GOD WHO HELPS YOU GET UP AFTER YOU BREAKDOWN FROM THEM. HE'S THE GOD WHO MOTIVATES YOU TO FIGHT AND DEFEND YOURSELF FROM THEM.

Percy hates Ares, BUT RICK IS WRITING PERCY!

So either Rick Riordan or his son HALEY RIORDAN (because Rick writes Percy mainly for Haley) hates Ares.

And you know what's so sad?

That this could've been a moment for self-growth from Percy. That he could've looked at Ares, what the god did, and think, 'Hey, I kind of hate him, but he's not all bad. He loves his kids and has done good things. Not everyone I hate is a bad person just because I hate them.'

But no. No, he has to end Ares' section in PJ'S GREEK GODS AND HEROES BY REWRITING ARES' MYTHS AND TWISTING THEM TO MAKE HIS OWN VERSION.

I'm so sick of how Dick Diordan writes Ares. I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of how he villainizes the crap out of him, because there's no fucking reason to do so.

Same with Aphrodite. I don't know what Rick's fucking deal is. Let the gods be gods.

I know this might be weird coming from me because I'm not a Greek or Hellenistic Pagan, but it's just, I've been having a hard time lately, and going through and reading Greek mythology and even Hellenism and Hellenistic Paganism has really helped me a lot, even if I'm an atheist myself, so yeah.

And you'll say, 'Oh, just don't read PJO!'

Well, PJO's permeated Greek mythology so hard that some idiots have trouble distinguishing PJO from the REAL thing, which is way better.

All of this had motivated me to finish my huge ass rant, possibly the longest one I'll ever make. Anyway, bye for now

[boytumms]

Okay don't mind me, I've just been reading too much about various sorts of mythology stuff and... old myths genuinely have a lot more weird pregnancy things than you'd expect (I still find the fact that Odin's eight-legged horse in Norse mytholohy is the son of Loki - whom Loki was pregnant wirh anf gave birth to, mind - way too funny, although that's completely beside the point), so... this isn't inspired directly by a specific myth, but reading random mythology stuff is kinda what put this into my mind

Anyway, I've been thinking of a boy who somehow manages to royally piss off a fertility god. Perhaps he defiles their shrine, or steal some sacred item or mess with their priest - or maybe him just refuses to do something the god wants him to do. And because gods are so well-known for never being spiteful and always giving proportionate and reasonable punishments (extreme sarcasm), the god curses the boy to become pregnant, but unable to give birth unless some extremely specific conditions are met. Maybe he can only give birth at one specific location, or has to eat some specific hard-to-aquire thing to induce labor, or it's one of those seemingly impossible and contradictory "neither at sea nor on land, neither at day nor at night, neither alone nor with other people" kind of conditions (i pulled that specific one out of my ass but you can find similar kind of contradictory and stupidly specific shit in mythology sometimes, you get my point), or some combination of the above, or some other stupidly specific and unintuitive condition, idk.

And the boy doesn't know the condition, of course. The first nine months he simply waits for the pregnancy to run its course, but as the months stretch on past the ninth, past the tenth, with no sign of the pregnancy coming to an end, he realizes he's not getting off the hook that easily. By then, of course, he's so heavily pregnant that everything is difficult - he can't walk very far at once at all, he needs ridiculous amounts of fabric to have clothes that fit, the baby - or babies, rather; he can't tell but he thinks he must have two or three in there - are restless and kick and writhe so he hardly has a moment's peace from them...

So he becomes searching for some solution, some way to birth the babies. First whatever conventional ways there are to induce labor. None of them do anything. He prays and makes sacrifices to the god, groveling and apologizing and begging for relief. No response. Then, he begins to seek out wise people, priests and oracles and shamans, first close by, then traveling further and further away to find someone who could tell him what to do.

It takes years, years of incredibly difficult travel, of weird looks from others and humiliation and yet often having to rely on the aid of other people to get to wherever he's going this time, because really he's in no state to travel except he doesn't have a choice. After the initial nine months, the babies do seem to grow slower than before that, but they do still grow little by little, making the burden quite literally heavier to bear, and they are restless in his womb, as though they too would know it is well past their time to be born already.

But finally, after years of searching, years of torment, the boy finds out the condition, and figures out a way to fulfill it. Once that is done, though, there's still the incredibly long and painful process of labor and giving birth to the babies, now much larger than his body ever was designed to give birth to...

I loooove perpetual pregnancies like this!!! It could even be similar to the Greek story abt Leto, so he’s in labor as he tries to figure out how to break his curse. Imagine him having to suffer through contractions, feeling his baby’s head sooo painfully low in his hips as he tries to push but the curse prevents it from coming out all while he’s in search of a way to give birth.

After years and years of searching, his babies become massive. Even with the slowed growth, they’d be the size of 2-3 year olds by the time he finally manages to fill the conditions to progress his labor. Maybe as he’s finally giving birth to his first baby, the god that cursed him decides to come down, just to torment him one last time before his punishment is over. There’s nothing the boy can do to get way from the god, belly pinning him to the ground with the weight of his writhing babies, unable to escape the wrathful god. Each time his baby comes to a crown, the god pushes it back in, making his scream is sob in agony, begging to be let go as it makes his tummy twist and writhe. He tries to kick and push the god away, but he’s too weak after carrying such a burden with him for so many years, completely helpless in the hands of his tormentor.

It goes on for days, weeks even, the god switching between pushing his babies back into his belly, then and painfully squeezing the swell to watch him thrash. Once they’re sure he’s learned his lesson, they let the last baby slip out between his trembling legs, leaving him exhausted, alone, surrounded by half a dozen massive babies as he’s finally allowed to pass out

[sweetteaanddragons]

Hi! Hope you don't mind a question about your Silmarillion/EPIC:tm crossover, but the idea won't leave me alone.

If you were writing a fic based on this premise, which characters would you have escape with Maedhros' party? Did you have a specific ensemble in mind? Or is there some other character from Greek Mythology who you'd like to see Maedhros meet during his travels?

Hope you have a good day!

Oooh!

The key in my mind was his rescue of Astyanax, but I was also picturing him managing to get Andromache out, and once I saw your post about Cassandra, she firmly joined the ensemble in my mind. Other than that, I'm afraid my knowledge of Troy isn't deep enough to be specific.

I don't think Maedhros and Co. would end up recreating Odysseus's journey in full (for one thing, they have no reason to try to get to Ithaca), but I have been picturing them stealing one of the Greeks' boats on the way out and then ending up dealing with the lotus eaters and the cyclopes. The lotus eaters because while Maedhros wouldn't recognize the fruit like Odysseus did, I think he would be wary of glowing fruit, especially if surrounded by people who were acting weird . . . but I also think he'd have to wrestle with temptation there in a way Odysseus didn't. It's a way out of his problems that would be really, really appealing to him, but I do think his sense of duty would win out; it canonically seems to have, at least until things were Definitively Over.

Polyphemus, on the other hand, I think Maedhros would handle way better. Anyone who can handle a continent crawling with dragons, Balrogs, and assorted monstrosities can handle a cyclops, and Maedhros is (a) not going to intentionally leave Polyphemus alive, and (b) if he has to retreat before killing him, he is definitely not going to shout out his name. Maedhros is probably not going to shout anything at Polyphemus because at this point he probably still does not even speak Greek.

(If somehow Poseidon still finds out and takes umbrage, though, Maedhros would at least have the advantage of being Very Used to sailing when you have displeased someone with power over the ocean, as well as the advantage of not having any destination in particular. At least this time he doesn't even feel guilty about what led to this!)

[stagkingswife]

So this is a silly question but I always wanted to start with paganism. And one fo the reasons is that I have been having this strange dreams for years by now.

They are all repetitive and way to constructed to be my own mind (I don't say it couldn't be me looking too much into it)

But in these dreams there is a entity, it has some weird noise I can't make out their gender. And they will just ask about my days, they will leave me weird cryptid messages about my past, or the moon.

They always leave me with a big scent of lavender stuck on my head, and ever since this started, a lot of lavender stuff and theme had come into my life without me even looking for it.

Any idea of who they could be?

I'm sorry to disappoint you, Anon, but I don't do entity identification through Tumblr anymore. Identifying an entity requires not only a lot of information, but a lot of time spent communicating with them - and I just don't have that time to spare anymore. But - teach a man to fish and all that - I'm happy to walk you through my process for how I go about identifying an entity, especially when you don't have a lot to go on.

Major Recorded Entity The easiest thing to either rule out, or get a solid confirmation of, is if the entity in question is a popular god or some other famous spirit. In your particular case you have a two concrete things to things to go on: The lavender scent and the messages about the moon, I would start by Googling like "Lavender Folklore" "Lavender mythology" maybe even "pagan deities associated with lavender," though I worry that last one will get you people's personal associations and UPGs rather than anything from the historical record. You could also break it down by culture if you wanted: "Greek god associated with lavender," "Egyptian god associated with lavender," etc. Then repeat your searched with "moon" instead of lavender, and look for overlaps. You're almost definitely going to get more moon results than lavender, so use it as a possible filter on your earlier results. Keep a list of any entity who turns up in this research, and specifically mark anyone who is particularly interesting to you for any reason. Next, if you haven't already, get yourself a divination tool, it's time to ask your visitor some questions! Go down your list and ask your visitor if they are the first name. Then the second name. Then the third. Do all of the names. Hopefully you're using a divination tool that has some nuance to them, like tarot, or playing cards, something else that can give you a "Yes, and..." or a "No, but" instead of just a flat yes/no. Adjust your list to yes, no, maybe. Be aware that you are likely to have more than one name in each list if you start with enough options. This doesn't mean that this entity is all of the yeses, just that it could be one of them, and you need to gather more information.

Common Type of Spirit If the above doesn't net you anything that feels like a solid enough yes after a couple of rounds of research and divination I usually move on from recorded deities and try to classify the entity as a broad type of spirit. My personal categories are: Deceased human, The Fair Folk, Elemental, Angels/Demons, Animistic spirits of Nature/Places/Objects, Household spirits, Creatures, and misc - but everyone has their own categories that they prefer to work with. Grab that same divination tool from before and ask the spirit to describe themselves. See if anything in the divination makes you think of one of your categories. Do you get a lot of nature imagery? Maybe they are a nature spirit. Do you get a lot home and hearth imagery? Maybe it's a household spirit. Etc.

Familiar Spirit I don't mean this in the normal familiar spirit sense, like a witches' familiar, I mean is this a spirit familiar to you in some way. Could you know them or have encountered them somewhere other than these particular dreams. This is another round of divination. But just like the last one you can ask this question once and have a conversation about it through your divination tool. Ask if you've encountered them before, if so where or how.

Unrecorded Entity If you don't get anything from any of the last steps that helps you identify the entity then you've reached the point that I usually start at. This entity is unrecorded, meaning they don't exist in human written culture. They may have had contact with people before, they may not have, either way, records of it either don't exist or didn't survive to the present day. You can have a really wonderful fulfilling relationship with an unrecorded entity, but you will have to chart the course of that relationship yourself. For any of the above types of spirits you could probably find someone who had experience with either the specific entity of the general type and sort of follow in their foot steps, but that's not necessarily possible with an unrecorded entity. Do I think it's likely that your dream visitor is an unrecorded entity, not necessarily, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the possibility.

You can also start identifying as pagan and developing a practice without involving this entity, either at first or at all. Maybe you've always love Greek mythology and want to start worshiping them! If so, do that! Get comfortable with your practice and see what comes of that. Maybe things will become clear! Either way, if you choose to join us, welcome to the community!

[greayworks]

The Yassification of Greek Mythology

Look I'm not going to be one of those "man gets a slight rush every time he tells someone John Lennon hit his wife" That's not helpful and a lot of people who do take issue do tend to also GREATLY oversimplify many Greek myths or act like there is one version when part of the difficulty of talking about these is trying to chase the exact roots given as many of these stories were mainly told orally and often changed depending on the area and culture as well as various translations and history of colonization.

Nor am I saying a writer can't be inspired by the stories and do their own thing.

But my personal issue with a lot of modern "Retelling of Greek myth!" is how a lot of them weirdly lack nuance, even compared to the original source. Was Greek society very patriarchal? Yes but there were still women present and frequent in stories and had different roles.

Most retellings don't really put a different twist on it or explore the side characters' nuance, it's incredibly simplified "This person was actually cool/sad/good and the ones against them suck"

It's the weird Yassification of some characters and mythos that kind of bugs me. Were there queer lovers in Greek mythology and history? Yes, quite a lot actually, but maybe making Ganymede Zeus's twink in your story a bit in poor taste given pretty much his only story is about him being kidnapped and becoming Zeus cup bearer between the ages of 16-12.

Or stuff like the Amazons, people like the idea of a woman-only warrior-based culture but just not really acknowledge the actual warrior side and some of the crimes they'd commit and conflicts they'd get into because "that's not fun!"

Complexity is removed from SO many stories, factions and conflicts to have a clear cut good guy who mainly reacts and an atrocious villain whose philosophies seem to be weirdly modern in how awful they are. Making Heraclues a blood-lustful berserker warrior who or a a happy dummy who uses his strength to solve all his problems is really odd considering in his story his intelligence and wit is constantly underestimated by King Eurystheus but he uses tactics and cunning to achieve several of his labors.

Also, the enlightened Chad angelic Athena and the angry evil demonic Ares in a lot of media is really funny to me because the only thing that makes Athena more positive is her description. "Goddess of Wisdom" sounds really nice but it's still referring to warfare.

Ares is described as wrathful in a lot of stories but that being his only trait is very odd to me when he's a much more nuanced figure than that. Instead, he's a red-pilled dummy in most stories now because he has a different descriptor than Athena.

It's a sign of lack of curiosity of searching for other myths or stories to adapt because people already know of these.