daemonwaters

[daemonwaters]

"Persephone never actually cheated because the story of Adonis is from Mesopotamian mythology, which means it's not a real Greek myth."

Okay well we might as well just remove every myth involving Aphrodite from "canon", because she was originally a Mesopotamian goddess as well.

[daemonwaters]

When Elia had learned of the match their lady mothers had made, and their lord fathers had agreed to, she had been less than pleased to find herself betrothed to the Lannister heir. Jaime had still been just a boy when they had exchanged their vows in the sept at Casterly Rock. She wondered if he even understood the vows that he was making.

Ten years on, with his parents in their graves and Jaime proving to be a fair leader, Elia thinks that mayhaps her opinion is beginning to change. The boy becomes the man, and the man makes her laugh and blushes when she touches him. He looks at her as though her own hands had placed the stars and the moon into the skies.

Mayhaps the arrangement is not so bad.

Mayhaps she is falling in love with her husband.

***

A little while ago, I came across art of Elia and the Martells by @amaati and fell absolutely in love. The what-might-have-been potential of Jaime/Elia has been my pet rarepair ship for a long time, and so I commissioned this art from her! I am bowled over by how beautiful, delicate, and lovely it is. Thank you, amaati!

[daemonwaters]

Baelor the Blessed (inspired by Aziz/@historyofwesteros most recent cosplay!)

[daemonwaters]

It's always very telling when certain people dismiss the Telegony or other stories in the Epic Cycle as being "just fanfiction of Homer", as if Homer is a verifiably real person who actually wrote the Odyssey and Iliad all by himself.

Honestly just say you're ignoring it because you dislike it, it's a far more respectable view than saying you don't really get how mythology works.

[daemonwaters]

And the winner is... Apollo! Second place is Hermes, third place goes to Artemis, fourth to Dionysus, and fifth to Persephone.

As expected, Hephaestus and Ares got a combined zero votes.

Curious what people think.

[daemonwaters]

If only Robert Graves got a tenth of the vitriol Ovid always gets, but his brand of bullshit unfortunately attracts the type of people that think they've found the "real" greek myths

[daemonwaters]

Although a goddess of war, [Athena] gets no pleasure from battle, as Ares and Eris do, but rather from settling disputes, and upholding the law by pacific means.

I... what? Athena is a pacifist goddess who doesn't like war?

Has Robert Graves ever heard of the Homeric Hymm to Aphrodite?

What does please her is wars and what is done by Ares, battles and fighting, as well as the preparation of splendid pieces of craftsmanship.

[daemonwaters]

From Typhon the giant and Echidna were born Gorgon . . . Medusa, [was] daughter of Gorgon

Interesting idea for Medusa retellings: combining Hyginus's account of Medusa's ancestry with the myth where Hera gives birth to Typhon, making Medusa her great-granddaughter.

[daemonwaters]

Curious what people think.

[daemonwaters]

Zeus watching everyone turn Demeter into a villain in retellings of Persephone's abduction to make it an unproblematic love story

[daemonwaters]

Hera: I'm going to birth a monster to overthrow you, plot against you multiple times, torment your lovers and their children, and have your baby heir ripped limb from limb by titans

Zeus: alright boo, you do you

Hera: Also, I'm going to make Heracles' boat trip back from Troy kind of stormy

Zeus: That does it, I'm tying you up and using you for target practice

[daemonwaters]

EROS: You might let me off, Zeus! I suppose it was rather too bad of me; but there!—I am but a child; a wayward child.

ZEUS: A child, and born before Iapetus was ever thought of? You bad old man! Just because you have no beard, and no white hairs, are you going to pass yourself off for a child?

Eros: im just a little baby

Zeus: bitch, you're older than my father, do you really think that's going to work on me

[daemonwaters]

Zeus and the Collared Dove

So the other day I cam across an interesting Greek myth about the creation of the Eurasian collared dove, involving Zeus.

A maid who worked hard for little money was unhappy that she was only paid 18 silver coins a year and begged the gods to let the world know how little she was rewarded by her mistress. Zeus, hearing her pleas, created the collared dove, which has called out "decaocto" ever since to tell the world of the maid's mistreatment.

(decaocto is Greek for "eighteen", in case you were wondering)

Now, this seems like your typical Greek myth. Some guy is a jerk, someone else prays to the gods, the gods create something new. But I was curious, where was this from? I've never heard it before. Looking at Wikipedia, it has two sources for this attribution. The first is from discoverwildlife.com, which just repeats the myth without any attribution. The second is from medium.com, which attributes it to a site called allaboutbirds.org, which again, just repeats the story without any attribution.

So I went looking around on the Internet. Thankfully, the blog of a sixty year-old British nature lover mentions having read the fact in a book by the name of Birds Britannica. God bless Bug Woman.

Cracking open the book, it attributes the story to a research paper by British ornithologist James Fisher. Alright, that's something. The paper was fortunately available online as a PDF, which I've linked here.

It was this legend, here written as recounted by C. Hinke to J. Fr. Naumann (1837), that led the Hungarian naturalist Friv- aldszky (1838) to name the Collared Turtle Dove Columba risoria, var. decaocto (now Streptopelia decaocto) [...] Owing to the obscurity of the journal in which Frivaldszky published his original description of the dove, there have been rather frequent errors in the literature. ' Frivaldszky' has often been spelt ' Frivalszky ', and given various initials, G., E and I. His name, in Hungarian style was Frivaldszky Imre, which has been Germanised as Imre or Emerich von Frivaldszky. The most readily available version of his original paper is the German translation of Reiser. (1894, p. 142).

Normally, this is where I'd give up. I don't know Hungarian or German, so tracking down an almost 200 year-old anecdote written in a language I don't understand seemed a little difficult.

Thankfully, another blog (seriously, these ornithology blogs are a lifesaver) was on the same train of thought as me about the collared doves a little while ago and managed to track down the book. Finally, we get to the bottom of it: Hinke heard the story of the collared dove's creation as a local legend while on a research trip in 1830's Bulgaria.

Okay, so now we know there's an actual story. Search over, right? But the lack of a source beyond a local legend does make me wonder about its authenticity. Is this a "real" (not that all greek myths have everything in common) greek myth? Or did someone a couple generations prior figure the bird's cry sounded like "eighteen" in Greek, and construct a story off of that? It seems odd that such a legend would remain alive and present almost a thousand years past the conversion of the last known greek pagans without being written down.

Of course there's a rather large possibility I'm wrong. I don't know Greek, I've never been to Bulgaria, it'd be rather presumptuous of me to dismiss it because I somehow know better than them. Australian Aborigine Dreamtime legends have been passed down for thousands of years in oral tradition. Koine Greek, which is over two thousand years old, has the same word for "eighteen" as Modern Greek. It is theoretically possible that a legend from when the greek gods were still worshiped survived all the way to the 1800s.

Anyways, that's how I spent my Thursday. Thank god for ornithology blogs, I'd probably still be wandering around in circles.

[daemonwaters]

The most painfully relatable thing for me in the movie was Superman/Clark talking about his favorite music and Lois basically calling him a poser-ass bitch

[daemonwaters]

Love how Kara's idea of playing around with Krypto is him slamming her down so hard it cracks the ground, and how it pretty much says all you need to know about them

[daemonwaters]

First, see what random superpower you get.

Second, see the other half of your powerset.

Lastly, see what character archetype you'll be.

[daemonwaters]

Saw the Odyssey preview before Superman the other day and my immersion was instantly shattered when I heard Jon Bernthal's voice. Sorry Nolan, but he is just not suited for any role that takes place before the late 1900s.