#me shaking the gods violently again: LET YOURSELVES FEEL you are PEOPLE you are FLAWED and you need to CHILL TF OUT

[byfulcrums]

I love TOA so fucking much. The way it makes it clear that the gods are people. The way it makes us realize that so many of them are victims too. The way it tells us that they might've been victims once, but now they're almost as bad as their abusers

The emotions of a human are not things a god should feel. Apollo says this multiple times. Humans feel bad when they kill others. They love, hate, get angry — they are happy. Their lives are so so short, but they somehow manage to change drastically during them, shaping the world after their image in a different (and sometimes better) way than the gods'

Gods cannot do any of this. Gods are immortal, unchanging, uncaring. Gods leave their children to die. Gods have sex only to abandon their lovers later. Gods are jealous beings, the opposite of good people. Gods are not people at all, is what they want us to think

But Apollo, turned human and far weaker than he ever was, is still a god. He has thousands of years of memory — he is jealous, he abandoned his children and lovers, he sent little kids to do things for him when he could've very easily done it himself. And yet, he cares. He's surprisingly selfless, even if he tries to convince us otherwise, and he loves and has given up on expecting something in return

Apollo is a god. Apollo is the living proof that gods aren't unchanging — he's the reason we know that gods are people. Some very powerful and fucked up people, but people nonetheless

And here's the thing: Apollo's given up on all that, a long time before we see him for the first time. The gods used to care. But their caring brought pain and despair upon the world and they don't seem to realize (or maybe they just don't care. Ha. Pun) that their uncaring attitude is doing the exact same thing

Even if they could, some of them wouldn't visit their children. They're not good people, after all. But they can try

Apollo wants to try. He wants to change for the better, and this isn't something good for a god, but he still does. And I think that the other gods could too, some day