#you don't need to rehash the same british story we've heard fifty times tell us something new

[navree]

God that Cleopatra show is so fucking stupid. And the fact their saying its a documentary! Wtf

I haven't watched it and I have no desire to because it's everything I've been railing against for years (she's part of the ptolemaic dynasty! they're literally known for having a christmas wreath for a family tree! she's the culmination of like three hundred years of white macedonians fucking their siblings and their kids over and over again! this woman could be played by kristen stewart and it would be accurate casting!) and I would just get mad. The attempts to try and paint this as in any way historically accurate are especially galling, considering the legacy of the Ptolemies. They came down from Macedonia and literally conquered Egypt for themselves, refused to engage with the culture or the language or the people in any meaningful way until Cleopatra, who then proceeded to miscalculate so spectacularly that she ended up being the catalyst for Egypt becoming a colony for the next two thousand years. The Ptolemies were a bunch of white partiers high flying their way through Egypt and not caring about maintaining the country in any meaningful way and were directly responsible for its waning power in the Mediterranean (Auletes literally needed to beg for Rome's intervention to get his throne back, my God the Ptolemies were pathetic), and to try and heap all that fail-legacy on the idea that Cleopatra was "culturally black" (literally what the fuck does that mean) is honestly a bit insulting. Talk about Cleopatra if you want, but just admit that it's because she's just Egypt's most famous white lady and stop trying to justify it with some idea that she was actually even remotely ethnically Egyptian at all when she certainly wasn't and it's incredibly provable.

And I honestly want Hollywood and the entertainment industry to ask themselves: why do they keep wanting to tell Cleopatra's story? What's the point? Every time anyone tries, it's always framed around two things: her relationship with Julius Caesar and the tumult of that time period, or her relationship with Mark Antony and the tumult of that time period. And in both cases, Egypt and Cleopatra are on the periphery of that story, with the core drama centered around the Romans and their dynamics (Caesar and the Ides and Brutus and Cassius, or Antony and Octavian and the last war of the Republic). That's where the meat is, and Cleopatra's function is to just be a love interest and then die. There's a reason why I vastly prefer reading about Actium in an Antony or Octavian biography, rather than a Cleopatra one; they're the ones with the biggest stakes in the game and whose decisions are shaping the outcome. Octavian didn't even care about Cleopatra, not really, he wanted Egypt for the money but his primarily goal was to get Antony out of the way and assume sole power for himself. There are stories that can center Cleopatra, but those mostly involve her early reign, like her and her father's flight to Rome or her succession issues with her siblings, and we really don't see a lot of media that wants to engage with that at all. So pop culture is focused on Cleopatra as a side character, and I think it's incredibly telling that even then, they still took the white lady and ran with her the most when they refuse to do anything actually interesting, as opposed to looking at stories about actual Egyptians.

There are so many interesting Egyptian figures I wish were getting more press, Egyptians who were actually, you know, ethnically Egyptian. I'm incredibly partial to the late Eighteenth Dynasty and early Nineteeneth Dynasty myself (I have a fondness for the Amarna period in particular) and I would kill to see anything from that, or about Hatshepsut, and I'll even allow for a skipping of Tutankhamun given how done to death he's been. These people all have incredibly fascinating stories where they're, you know, the central figures, where they affect the world and where their actions have weight and consequences. Tell those stories, adapt that history, rather than trying to shove some ridiculous narrative that a woman who owned slaves and who is, I'm sorry, most famous for fucking up, is actually peak representation for your modern American understanding of race and ethnicity. I'd kill for more documentaries about Ancient Egypt and some of these royals, give me them and enough with fucking Cleopatra.