#[ then its INFLICTING MINTH ON YOU ALL TIME ]

[spiderwarden]

A BIG THANK YOU! TO ALL OF MY MUTUALS FOR HAVING PATIENCE WITH ME AND PUTTING UP WITH MY MADNESS THIS PAST WEEK!

SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO:

@orchideae / @menzoberras / @apalestar / @starlatan / @triickst / @vlaakithswill / @oflolth / @deathvisited / @yunhuntress / @sunnedspawn / @wizofwaterdeep / @shentacles

AND OF COURSE I CANNOT FORGET:

@demonstigma , @roguerolled , @sageofthestrange , @wornkindness , @dekariosa , @npcharacters , @boysgallery , @lolthswear , @th-ramblr , @bolyde , @enrhysmion , @1nflesh , @drakeheir , @shemurder , @darlingdesiredelicious ,@defyxoblivion , @persistentflower , @pluviacuratio , @hegrowth , @liltaventures , @sunderdust , @devi1lute , @o4thbroken , @darkdabbling , @z4r , @cambius , @practicallyinviincible , @lolthswcrn , @taintedpvct ,@cagedchoices , @revyved , @astaricn , @crowtongued , @astralfox0893 , @allnostalgic , @oflostinfound , @callidusdryadalis ,

AND TO ALL OF YOU WHO SHOWED THEIR SUPPORT!!! SORRY IF I MISSED YOU! Thank you for having such patience with me as we all went through this madness! Let's hope our dear friends are released soon as well!

[yloiseconeillants]

MAYNCIENT :: Day 10 - Promise

"I told you I'd be back for them."

Mnemosyne (angel) belongs to @hermits-hovel. The explanation of this sequence got *very* long so I'm putting it under a cut but MASSIVE ARIADNE LORE DUMP LMAO

Amaurotine social conventions discourage the expression of extreme emotions, which could make the processing of things like grief and alienation difficult when there isn't a cultural framework to acknowledge those feelings in the first place. Ariadne, who lost her brother, Midas, in an accident, has a very difficult time adjusting to his loss - most Amaurotines have only experienced death through the deliberate choice of returning to the Star, which is universally considered a beautiful and respectable event. This disconnection between the grief that Ariadne felt at his passing was at odds with the pride that she was expected to show, and she withdrew from almost every aspect of her life - stopped going to theatre rehearsals, barely showed up to her classes, avoided her friends and loved ones (there was a fairly dramatic breakup with Hades at this point after he refused to fetch her brother from the Aetherial Sea - he didn't understand why she felt so despondent about Midas' death which. Boy howdy does that become a Plot Point Later) (he did try to help but he absolutely was not equipped to do so).

Over time and with the very patient help of her mentor, Halmarut, she slowly rejoined society after graduating by taking on a student-teacher job at Halmarut's personal request. She still wasn't fully comfortable being open with other people after her withdrawal and instead developed a sort of party-girl persona to interact with others. As long as she was having Fun, she didn't have to think about everything she had lost in the meantime. She met the rest of her eventual friends and lovers in the GAP at this point, starting with Timoria, who she first met in a bathroom at a party while she was crying and Mori and Ari's woo-girl energy fed off each other as they navigated Amaurot.

Of course, new interpersonal relationships and dynamics means More Feelings and Ariadne still hadn't really ever stopped grieving so she ends up easily overwhelmed by her emotions, which caused her to act out in erratic and sometimes self-destructive ways, including the ever-green clown daughter favorite Causing Problems on Purpose. When the inevitable consequences of these actions backfire on her in small or less small ways, she tries to drown them out by escalating the FUN and attempting to block out her own memories to get through the day, first by narcotics and when that doesn't work, she pressures her friend Mnemosyne, whose literal job is preserving memories, into the experimental field of removing memories. She isn't necessarily just banking sad memories, but anything that causes her to feel what she determines is Too Many Feelings.

(yes we're doing a self-inflicted eternal sunshine of the spotless mind kind of thing uwu)

Mnemo is uncomfortable with this, as it's not really what he is supposed to be doing with his powers, but Ariadne assures him that she will eventually come back to collect the archived memories, which Mnemo preserves in a crystal he developed for this very purpose. She spends years not coming back for those memories, though, instead compounding the problem by increasingly dropping memories off with Mnemo until it becomes clear to her girlfriend, Minthe, that something is terribly wrong with Ariadne's memory. Minthe confronts Ari about this, and Ari promises that she'll go and fetch the memories from the crystal (we've been affectionately calling it Ariadne's cringe compilation crystal) (there's a playlist).

Going back for the memories had its own issues and inevitable fallout, but Ariadne did try to regain those memories and work through them with her friends - one at a time, based on what she feels she can deal with. She doesn't manage to get all of them back before the End of Days - meaning that there's a memory crystal floating around with some Very Strong Feelings that's a repeated McGuffin through the eras in blorboverse.

ok i did it i wrote up the lore huzzah thank you for reading

bonus: also also this whole thing about her brother dying is why ariadne is obsessed with death and rot and decomposition and amaurot's refusal to acknowledge what is ugly about death thank you i have written enough

[shipcestuous]

Today I found myself thinking about how different authors try to downplay or erase incest in godly ships in Greek mythology retellings... stuff like, "the gods don't have DNA so it's different for them" or "gods are manifestations of cosmic forces so they only consider themselves related but aren't in a biological sense." One example I think is pretty funny in its execution is the webcomic Lore Olympus.

Now, I admit I've never read it, but from what I understand, the main characters, Hades and Persephone, aren't uncle and niece. Hades is brothers with Zeus and Poseidon, but Persephone was created with magic by Demeter, who was also created with magic alongside Hera and Hestia, her non-biologically-related sisters.

However, Persephone looks A LOT like Hades' mother, Rhea, to the point that people who like the comic sometimes say Hades is getting to "do it all over again" and have a better and healthier version of his parents' marriage (Hades himself looks a lot like his father, who is still Kronos, and yes, he still ate his kids) while people who dislike it (it's pretty divisive, and idly digging into all the drama is actually the one reason I know all this) joke about him just having Oedipus complex.

I think at one point (maybe before Lore Olympus was picked up by Webtoon?) Rhea actually had a much different design, but then the author retconned that to make her more similar to Persephone. And while Rhea is essentially a giantess, being a Titan, and Persephone is usually short and petite, Persephone can ALSO become a giantess, when she unlocks her full power or something like that. I think I've even heard that Hades REALLY likes it when she does that...

Anyway, in the same series, there's also two, or rather three, other examples of "related in myth, unrelated in the comic" that I think are quite unexpected and interesting.

One is Hestia and Athena. As I said above, Hestia isn't related to Zeus, and tbh, I'm not sure if ATHENA even is at this point, but in mythology, they're aunt and niece, being respectively Zeus' sister and his daughter. Here, they run some kind of support organization for young goddesses, where all new members have to take an oath of chastity and swear off relationship for some reason, but they actually have a forbidden secret relationship themselves.

Another, even more surprising one is Kronos and Hera... which leads directly to Hades and Hera right after. From what I understand, during the Titanomachy, Hera pretended to switch sides and ally herself with Kronos, but really, she was a double agent gathering intelligence to help Zeus and the others. To do that, she seduced Kronos, but then, he developed some sort of creepy, obsessive "love" for her. I think Rhea had been killed by Kronos or otherwise died by that point. Anyway, after Zeus freed his brothers and confined Kronos in Tartarus, Hera and Hades bonded over the trauma Kronos had inflicted on them and started a relationship, which I'm pretty sure continued for a time, in some on-and-off way, even after Hera married Zeus to become his queen.

Oh, and here's a fun bonus! Aside from all of this, I've heard of some much rarer, pseudo-incestuous, "unrelated in the myths, related in the comic" type weirdness, too...

You know the myth of Hades' concubine Minthe, whom he set aside after marrying Persephone, but who kept claiming Hades would leave Persephone to come back to her one day, until either Persephone or Demeter turned her into a mint plant for it in a rage? Well, in Lore Olympus, Minthe is Hades' girlfriend at the beginning of the story, but they both have issues and they aren't a good match for each other. Which is possibly why they have an open relationship, with Hades visiting strip clubs and whatnot and Minthe having a side thing with Thanatos, who is the son of Nyx and Erebos in the myths... but here turns out to be Hades' adopted son after Nyx left him in his care as a small child.

I distinctly remember seeing a panel showing that Hades had bought a ring for Minthe, so he must have been planning to propose to her before he met Persephone... which means that Thanatos was having an affair with a woman who could have soon become his own stepmother! Personally, I like to imagine what might have happened had they kept it up even with Minthe becoming Hades' wife... but that's just me, lol. In the comic itself, Hades eventually asks Minthe to have a more committed relationship despite already having feelings for Persephone himself, so she breaks it off with Thanatos, and he then moves on to Daphne, the same one Apollo falls in obsessive love with in the myths... yep, lots of unexpected ships, it seems!

But, imho, this is also interesting because Daphne is ANOTHER character who looks kind of a lot like Persephone. And, as an outsider looking in, it almost seems like a pattern for Thanatos to me... first going for his dad's girlfriend, then for a girl who's very similar to his dad's new girlfriend...

From what I think I understood about Thanatos' own subplot, Hades was a very neglectful and cold father to him because he was afraid that if he'd let himself grow close to him, eventually he'd somehow end up treating him the way Kronos had treated HIM as a child. But as a kid, Thanatos couldn't know what was actually going on in his head, and obviously he was still upset about Nyx abandoning him, so he started acting up, and then their relationship worsened from there. And so, my incest-shipping brain can't help but wonder... what if going for Minthe and then a Persephone lookalike was a subconscious way for Thanatos to try and feel closer to Hades, or maybe finally get his attention, if his affection was just too difficult to obtain...?

I think it's very unlikely I'll ever actually read Lore Olympus, because it seems longer than I usually like when it comes to romantic dramas and I've read some things about the way it handles its plot and characters, as well as certain sensitive themes (some of them showing up in the very same subplots I mentioned here, which would be the most interesting to me), that really put me off. But there's an AU of it more or less living rent-free in my head where Hades was in angsty unrequieted love with Rhea and Thanatos is now in angsty unrequieted love with Hades.

... And Hades/Persephone and Hestia/Athena are uncle/niece and aunt/niece, Kronos/Hera is father/daughter, and Hades/Hera is brosis, naturally. Because why not be as self-indulgent as I can while I'm at it, after all?

All of the incest with none of the incest? That's what this sounds like to me, lol. I do find the erasing of the incestuousness in various adaptations to be amusing. I just ignore it!

Some of these relationships in Lore Olympus sound pretty interesting. But they would be a lot more interesting if they were related!