Ok, Also With The Theseus Slander.

Ok, also with the Theseus slander.

How? Is it possible? To boil down a Greek hero so much that it’s actually possible to just flat out detest them.

I find it impossible to take the characters personally. Like people seem personally offended characters and I don’t get it. The characters are all so complicated that it’s impossible to just broad stroke psychoanalyse, and THEN proceed to act like the character has personally wronged you due to this diagnosis you have them based on your version preference when reading. Damn.

Yeah fun fact the villain in the story is Minos. The victims are the Athenian youths, the Minotaur. Theseus is the Hero, Ariadne is the Heroine. But Ariadne represents the suffering of the Athenians when she gets on the ship with them, even though she saved them, and Theseus’s dealing with that represents his tendency to make some very bad decisions, something that will haunt his character for the rest of his stories.

Maybe it’s the fact that I base my enjoyment of a character on how interesting they are. But Greek mythology is set up with these extremely complex characterisations alongside this tendency toward a deeply flawed hero. Not necessarily glorifying the fallenness, but using it to explore what happens to exceptional men when they are deeply flawed. That’s Theseus. He’s not a psychopath, not a narcissist. The texts paint him as a youth who began his ventures to find his place, who stepped up to save his kin, but whose chief and detrimental weakness was not thinking, and making bad decisions with big consequences based on just not fucking thinking anything through. He is a gut reaction person, he makes big moves based on where he finds himself in the moment. His character is glorifying the strength of the hero and, as so many men in mythology ARE WRITTEN, a cautionary tale against the flaws that lay a hero low.

Achilles is also one of these. Agamemnon is one of these. Hector, a great guy, but he has some flaws that get him in trouble. Jason too. Odysseus! And Theseus, a monumental figure, is one of these characters that implore men to be strong but to be wise, to think before they act.

Op, you have no idea what you've done to me. My neurons have activated. I've been pacing around my room naked for a solid hour. I had to take a nap and think about this. Ares is such an interesting god to me and you just give me this tid bit of knowledge like it's nothing??????

In the time I've had to think I've come to the conclusion that ares just wants you to fight.

Like, violence is his nature, right? I don't feel like he's going to scorn his warriors for their own violence any more than he will for yours. Everyone is able to partake in his violence and strength, if courage to fight is what you need then he opens his body for you to feast on him. Let his adrenaline course through your body as you stab out the eye of the man or women who dares to assault you. Either way violence is being enacted, so he should be satisfied.

I think he would prefer when a victim fights back because it elevated a simple attack into a battle.

Involving the times he himself would (maybe) assault some one, he might find it hot when his victims fight back. It could be foreplay to him. 🤷

Hey, I saw your Ares post!! I think what's noteworthy is that Zeus, Apollo, and Heracles all raped people. (Also, technically Zeus is supposed to uphold justics and whatnot.) I don't know Greek mythology as well as you, though, that's just what I think! <3

That's true. I didn't make this point in that post (though I did mention it previously), but the fact that the others do commit that kind of thing only makes it clear that someone not wanting one of their female relatives to be raped doesn't have to mean that they are opposed to rape in principle.

As for Ares, people often point out that he is the only Greek god with no rape myths, but, to be fair, with two or three exceptions his sexual adventures are about as detailed as the genealogies in the book of Genesis. So it might be technically accurate, but only because we know nothing about the vast majority of unions he engages in beyond the name of the mother and the identity of the resulting offspring. There are also instances where he behaves like other gods, fighting with others over a specific woman (Tanagra) or making use of disguise in order to impregnate someone (Phylonome), so Imma say that his reputation as someone who is particularly concerned with consent does seem to come pretty much out of nowhere.

There is this very interesting post discussing the connections between war, the sacking of cities and sexual violence. To quote a part of it: „this epithet ['Sacker of Cities'] cannot be interpreted as distinct from sexual violence. Sacking, as Gaca explains, is systematically killing all warriors and violating all women and girls to ensure they are subdued, owned, and forcibly bear your own children, which doubles the ownership. This is not frowned upon or the work of foot soldiers; rather, these are their orders from their commanders. Ares is continually used as a metaphor, a personification of this practice, and so is anything but unproblematic in both our modern eyes and the Greeks' own religion; he is a revered god as much as one to keep far, far away”

No but I generally think more people should stop talking about Medusa's relationship with Perseus and more towards Medusa's relationship with Perseus's mother.

(In the version where Medusa was assaulted by Poseidon and Perseus's mother assaulted by Zeus) they are narrative foils/counterparts. Or at least they both experience similar traumas.

Apropos of nothing, Perseus is a perfect baby angel who only ever did what he had to do to protect his mother from forced marriage and a lifetime of sexual assault.

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Greek mythology retellings are so fucking cool because mythology is, as a whole, very fluid. There isn't really anything that's a cohesive story, from beginning to end. There are so many versions of myths, which all reflect the values of society at that time.

Of course, sometimes those values are misogyny, so you get shit like women characters who are either good and submissive or sexy and evil, or SA being common and/or expected, but that's why these myths are retold.

The values of society changes so often, and the stories we tell change with it. People like homer wrote down the stories of their time, generations after the stories actually originated.

Retellings are a great way to participate in this millenia long tradition of telling stories, because we shape the stories to be a reflection of our time as well.

That's why I've written this essay on there are other ways from epic: the circe saga because–