a-thousand-ships

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https://archiveofourown.org/works/66663484/chapters/171982990

Summary: Helen dedicates herself to matchmaking to distract herself from her own crush. Her friends— and the school play— won't let her.

I finished the first draft of my current WIP and my beta reader won’t let me look at it for a week so I’m writing this. Go take a peek!

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scrunkly blorbos except they’re a nuanced dead person that you need to handle with care like a fragile package

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> read library book

> it's good

Thank you library

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Underrated Menelaus scene in the Odyssey where he basically gets told that he gets special treatment (sweet ride to Elysium in the afterlife) and Zeus’ stamp of approval for being Helen’s husband

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HAPPY FATHERS DAY❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️

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odysseus absolutely does present a threat to penelope if he perceives her as at all unfaithful, and i feel the unfairness of this, and i think people tend to undersell how much tension at least potentially exists between odysseus and penelope. but i'm also like. his reaction, all speculation aside, his actual reaction in the odyssey to her flirting with the suitors is delight, because he immediately ascertains that she is running a con. sorry that they're so in-sync in spite of the forces that try to drive a wedge between them, including their own misgiving hearts. sorry that they invented homophrosyne ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I want to see old age with you

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Being demisexual and bi is funny to me. Anyone can hit it but you must suffer The Gauntlet first

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I live in fear for what Nolan's Odyssey adaptation holds for my girls Athena, Nausicaa, Kirke, Helen, Clytemnestra, and Penelope.

Like, I don't trust Nolan with the characterization of any of these women and the casting has me nervous. I love all the actresses in question (that we currently know of) but not in these roles. Nolan has a pretty constant way of portraying women in the work of his I've seen and while I don't (always) hate it, I definitely don't have faith in it

None of those character types embody the quiet dignity, intelligence, cunning, and sadness that defines Penelope. He's either gonna go too little on her being Odysseus' equal and not fully display her manipulative, analytic mind that kept her and Telemachus safe and the kingdom running for 20 years or he's gonna girl boss and/or femme fatale it. Honestly the greatest risk in an adaptation of Penelope is that people seem to think that because we don't truly know Penelope's thoughts, motives, and heart outside of what we can see externally through other characters interactions and perceptions of her that she's a blank slate to work with.

None of them embody the complexities of Helen, her mixed loyalties, questionable morals and motives, her love for her husband (Menelaus), her disdain for Paris that's gonna have to be touched on if they want her to have a large role in this movie the way I think they will, the grief she felt for those within Troy she did come to love as family, and just everything about her.

None of them capture the true stoicism mixed with fondness and respect that Athena has towards her champions. The intricate relationships she has with the Ithacan royal family. I can't even explain all the ways they could fuck up Athena we'd be here all day.

Genuinely I'm gonna be upset however they handle Nausicaa because I have no faith in them not to sexualize her role to an absurd extent and make her entire character as just a girl with a crush on Odysseus.

Kirke is.... Nolan is going to butcher the deeper themes and implications of everything on Aeaea, there's really no reason to pretend otherwise. Goodbye my morally grey goddess that I find fascinating but won't excuse the actions of, I'll mourn you yet another time. Is one accurate depiction of Kirke so much to ask? Just one depiction that acknowledges what she did to Odysseus? Because that's a part of her character! She's messed up and turns dudes into animals for anything from being rude to rejecting her advances!!

I swear if Clytemnestra doesn't get to be as messed up and nuanced as she is in this movie (that she shouldn't really be in) Imma be mad. Like, let me have my "needs to be in a mental facility for all that mess" character of interest be! If they change Agamemnon's death into a battle scene between the two of them I'm gonna scream.

None of these women deserve to either be reduced to two dimensional archetypes or girl boss characters that only exist to show fake feminist allyship.

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I have this image in my head of post-return Odysseus remembering Agamemnon's warning to him in the underworld ('don't tell Penelope everything right when you get home bc I trusted my wife when I got home and she murdered me, women are tricky like that') and just thinking "MY wife would NEVER kill me with hammers. Seethe and cope, idiot." in the vague direction of Agamemnon's ghost

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clytemnestra they will never make me hate you

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“I shall teach you old men the lesson you failed to learn when you were children” Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' Agamemnon (trans. Ted Hughes)

Clytemnestra is the wife of Agamemnon, the king of Atreus and commander of the Greek army that assails the walls of Troy. In order to placate the goddess Artemis, he sacrifices his oldest daughter Iphigenia on the goddess’ altar, spilling her blood and breaking the heart of his wife in the process. Clytemenestra, consumed by hatred and the desire for revenge after the murder of her daughter, invites Agamemmnon’s cousin and enemy Aigisthos into the palace and into her bed, while Agamemnon is away at Troy. Finally, after 10 years of waiting, Agamemmnon returns triumphant to his city, palace and wife. Finally, after 10 years of waiting, Clytemnestra gets her revenge and murders her husband in the bath. Through fear and intimidation tactics, she and her lover Aigisthos assume the throne and live happily - for a while. Years later, her now grown son Orestes, who grew up far away, and her daughter Electra conspire to kill their own mother as revenge for the murder of their father. She dies screaming, kicking, cursing and Orestes falls mad with the blood guilt of murdering your own mother. Only after the intervention of a god or two, order is restored in the house of Atreus. For now, at least.

To me, Clytemnestra is a character transcending boundaries. The adulterous wife, the villainess that kills her husband, the wronged mother revenging her daughter, the cold queen disowning her grieving children, “a man’s heart in a woman’s body”, as Aischylos puts it. She’s all that and more. In Euripides’ Electra she even is a doubting woman looking back on her life and her choices, maybe not regretting but perhaps questioning what it was all for. She’s all of these things, yet none of them wholly. You look at her and you feel for her because how could he, how could her beloved husband murder their perfect innocent daughter, all for the promise of Troy. You look at her and you revel in her bloodlust as she swings the axe at Agamemnon and gives the perfect villain speech at the steps of his, well now her, palace. You look at her and you’re repelled by the ice cold indifference towards her remaining children, abandoned like a toy no longer worth playing with. Was there only enough love for the one daughter in her? When she kills Agamemmnon does she feel relief, satisfaction, finally she has had her triumph over the one who wronged her more than any other? Or is there also a tinge of sadness, of grief, for the life she used to know, before the day her daughter’s blood got spilled in the name of a war she doesn’t care about? 

She certainly doesn’t tell us. None of the characters do.

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literally hermione of sparta and the children of agamemnon

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The world if girls would project their mommy issues on Clytemnestra and Electra, Helen and Hermione, Cassiopeia and Andromeda, Hera and Angelos etc. instead of Demeter and Persephone:

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princesses of sparta

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Queen Clytemnestra of Mycenae as the “Death” tarot card

upright meaning: destruction, finality, transformation, sudden change

reversed meaning: resistance, repeating negative patterns, attachment to the past

line art under the cut