#anti claire

[thoughtfulchaos773]

Say the words

Doing a rewatch. Did we already discuss how Claire forcing Carmy to say "I want you to have my number" and "okay, say that one more time" equivelant to

Donna: Just say the words, Carm

Mikey: Just say the fucking words

Carmy: I love you.

Uncomfortable.

[periprose]

i dont know if i like or hate claire yet. she kind of reminds me of one of my previous managers, who was a total asshole, but also she hasn't done anything wrong.

I also dislike when a show tells you this person is meant to be important just because they came from the past!! like I feel no connection to her even if the show is framing her like "ooo so important to Carmy and she's a girl oooo" it's lazy writing and not very good for a show that is so on point with all it's other writing. also she just feels boring. idk

you know who else is a girl? sydney. im thinking this girl is just an obstacle to them. or maybe I'm just coping.

Like Molly gordon is acting fine as well. but a lot of her lines and the music in the background is just made to make us think "ohhh this is the girl" which is annoying because she doesn't have much of a character and she's just there to be the quirky, obvious one? like how do I explain? shes just so transparently written as the love interest and the show is telling us we're supposed to care but I just... don't. lol

[cosmic-light-fics]

Watching 2x09 again. Don't judge me, I can't stop watching this show.

Claire calls Carmy 30 minutes before The Bear opens................. She calls him on the most important, stressful day of his life 30 minutes before he is supposed to open his new restaurant. And knowing what she was calling about after he listens to her voicemail in the next episode.... I'm too through.

I've had it. I don't like her. I'm sorry, but no fucking way is that acceptable.

[mod-doodles]

Also why does Claire call herself ‘almost a Doctor’?

When you graduate from medical school, you’re a doctor. When you’re in your residency, you’re a resident doctor.

I graduated from Grey’s Anatomy so I know 🫣.

The writers really don’t fuck with Claire for real. Gave her the shittiest script, the worst ‘love’ story and suffering.

Why y’all got me thinking about Claire again: inspired by. I tried to move on.

[childofaura]

All right, it seems like I’ve got a lot of understanding and rational people who responded to my earlier inquiry about making a Claire criticism post. So I’m gonna go ahead and do it, since this is something that’s sat in my mind every time a new installment of the ToA series came out.

SO BIG DISCLAIMER BECAUSE I WANT EVERYONE TO READ THIS BEFORE ANYONE GETS MAD AT ME:

THIS IS ALL MY SUBJECTIVE OPINION. I MIGHT BE PHRASING THIS POST LIKE IT’S AN ABSOLUTE, BUT IT’S NOT, IT’S ALL ISSUES I PERSONALLY FEEL WITH CLAIRE’S CHARACTER. SO IF YOU LIKE CLAIRE, THIS IS NOT A PERSONAL ATTACK OR ME TELLING YOU YOU’RE WRONG ABOUT SOMETHING/CAN’T LIKE CLAIRE.

Now that I think I’ve got that out of the way, I wanna jump into the actual post of why I’ve never really liked Claire’s character.

If we’re being really really REALLY honest... I think the issue is mostly based off of “The writers didn’t know how to write Claire”. I’ve felt like every character in Trollhunters (specifically Trollhunters, we don’t talk about 3Below and while Wizards was pretty positive overall, that was also a lot of hit or miss, and that series plays even more into why I don’t like Claire) was executed pretty well to fulfill their roles as characters or to be compelling and pretty easy to grasp their personalities.

Except Claire.

Personality issues:

Her character’s inconsistent and flip-flops. To start off, her intro in the series is just “pretty girl that Jim likes”. We get the promising sense that she has some non-conforming interests at first, as she’s advertising try-outs for the play, but that’s just lifted from the Trollhunters book and we never see any interest in theater arts from Claire ever again after that. Her hair (and I’m sorry but I hate her hair with all the stupid hairclips in the front, it’s so distracting and it looks dumb) with the streak in it and the skull shirt she wears makes you assume she’s somewhat rebellious, maybe kind of punk, but she’s a straight-A trouble-free student who’s apparently popular with everyone, and helps her mom out with campaigning for her political career. There’s really nothing to her personality that shows itself consistently, besides the Papa Skull interest.

And then there’s how badly her character and personality was executed at first; When Steve’s about to beat up Jim, she tries to step in but gets shoved back. Great! She has a sense of right and wrong and she’ll stand up for others. But then later on, she scolds Jim for the crime of... standing up for himself? Which sends a really bad message that she’d have rather had Jim publicly humiliate himself and/or possibly get beat up. Then later she’s willing to go to a Papa Skull concert with the same guy who shoved her. That’s incredibly weak character right there.

She starts to show some more positive character when after getting mad at Jim for trashing the house, she puts two and two together and realizes something’s off, but then she just... sneaks into his house like a weirdo, even though nothing about her character suggests that she’d do something like that and she has no real reason besides “Jim wasn’t straightforward about the party”; it’s not something a normal person would do or what SHE would do given her current character development. And then this one’s a smaller gripe, but I hated her scoff in Wizards when the tournament was going on and the guards didn’t let her in, she goes “Ugh, boys’ club!”. UH HELLO, YOU IDIOT. THERE WERE FEMALE GUARDS CLEARLY EMPLOYED IN ARTHUR’S SERVICE. HELL, THE GUARD THAT BULLAR ATE WAS A FEMALE GUARD. GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE AND STOP PRETENDING LIKE YOU’RE BEING SLIGHTED BECAUSE YOU’RE A GIRL. YOU WERE CONSIDERED A CIVILIAN TRYING TO ENTER A TOURNAMENT FOR TRAINED KNIGHTS.

Now past all the character inconsistencies in those first thirteen-ish episodes, the second issue I have with Claire’s character is that she teeters pretty dangerously into Mary Sue territory. Everyone (I was almost gonna say “who isn’t a major villain” but EVEN MORGANA ends up liking her. So MOSTLY everyone) who isn’t a main antagonist ends up liking Claire in some way. Steve the bully? Tries to date her. Mary, whom she said she wasn’t really close friends with? Is friends with her and even has her number. Freaking VENDEL, the grumpiest character in the show, only has to hear her talk in Troll and he immediately likes her without her having to earn his trust (which also she just... never uses Troll again. Sure is convenient that she learned to speak fluent Troll just for one scene and one character to like her). Morgana takes a liking to her. Compare that to how hard Jim had to work to gain the trust of others: His bond with Draal, learning to prove himself to Vendel, engaging with Nomura in prison and befriending her. She too easily assimilates with other characters; I’d have less issues if she had to work like Jim did, but the only time she does is with NotEnrique.

Skills and abilities don’t feel earned or consistent:

And then the whole thing with her powers and her physical abilities. It was never explained in the show how she actually obtained innate magic powers not connected to the Shadow Staff itself (And no, if you have to explain it on Twitter as a writer, that’s not good writing, that’s forcing your audience to play detective). She’s just all of a sudden doing awfully-convenient high-level magic in the first two episodes (or maybe three, whenever she created that shadow-cover for Jim and the others to escape.) without explaining HOW she had got those powers, and then she performs it perfectly whenever the plot needs it (She’s literally shown to be more powerful than Merlin, how stupid is that?). Remember in the movie where everyone was like “Oh no Claire, don’t use your powers because it could hurt you!” and she does anyways and she faints for like three seconds and then has no other physical repercussions? Or how she’s somehow MORE capable than Jim when it comes to fighting, like how in the Chinese Trollmarket she manages to swipe one of the other troll’s weapons, which has an entirely different weight and size to her shadow staff and probably required extensive training, and she just uses it flawlessly to fight? The only times Claire really fails are when the plot calls for it.

Plot can’t happen without her:

And finally, she hijacks the plot constantly, more than her character should, and has more importance placed on her role in the story than anyone else. Even Blinky. She even took over the plot for Wizards, which was supposed to be Douxie’s story and Douxie’s character-focus. The poor guy took a backseat to his own story because the plot relied on Claire to move forward, literally nothing could be done without her. And I mentioned it before but even though Douxie’s character still managed to get enough development, it was hardly enough because Claire hogged up so much screen-time focusing on HER and HER magic development and HER relationship with Morgana over Douxie and HIS magic development and HIS relationship with Merlin.

And also the fact that it’s Claire who ends up either saving the day or taking priority over the others. Who was the one who defeated Morgana in Trollhunters? Claire. Who brought Jim back to life as a human, despite the fact that even Merlin stated it was impossible for him to make Jim a human again? Claire. Who was it that Jim made sure to establish his relationship with, but not anyone else? CLAIRE. That ending in the movie where he doesn’t seem to care about his relationship with Blinky, Draal, Strickler, etc, but oh we’ve GOTTA have his girlfriend!

Overall, even typing this, I don’t think it’s her fault even though I hate her character; it’s the writers’ fault for doing such a sloppy and inconsistent job because she’s boiled down to just a “girl empowerment”. Because in the book, Claire Fontaine is AWESOME. She’s a Scot descended from a warrior lineage which actually explains why she has weapon capabilities, she’s explained that she’s not really a “popular girl” but she’s super confident in herself and doesn’t really care what others think, and that’s what Jim finds charming about her, and she rips Steve a new one after hearing that he’s just trying to charm her to piss off Jim.

But Claire Nunez is a mess of a poorly executed character. And again, I blame the writers because I think Claire could have been great if they knew what they were doing with her and made her balanced.

[saintnoname2]

Rewatching season 2 of The Bear and Claire's reaction to Carmy giving her a fake number? God, what a fucking slimeball. It's even creepier than I remember it being the first time. And I'm sure there will be other moments with Claire that'll be creepier to me the second time around, like the party. Were the writers intentionally setting up red flags like, "Hey, this could've turned abusive if it went on for too long" or were we really meant to side with her in the finale?

So much care has gone into every other character's arc (even characters who don't necessarily have "arcs" and only appear in an episode are still fully fleshed out) and so much care has gone into every other aspect of storytelling in this show that, like many others, I'm puzzled by Claire. Maybe it's supposed to be more, "Hey, this could've turned abusive if it went on for too long, but also Claire is still a person with feelings and those feelings were hurt and Carmy was stressed out being stuck in the walk-in and he could've handled the situation better and he could've broken up with her with more tact"?

They managed to give that kind of nuance to Donna. They made us empathize with her and feel bad for her while still showing she was abusive and it gave us an idea of where those abusive behaviors could've come from for her and gave us an idea of where some of Carmy's behaviors could've come from. And unfortunately, as someone who has already been abused by more than one person (let's not forget his former boss, too) and doesn't have much experience with romance and being able to recognize what healthy romantic relationships look like, Carmy is extremely vulnerable to being abused by a romantic partner.

This whole thing with Claire and how his relationship with his mom could've set him up to be in a toxic relationship could've had so much depth, but unfortunately, I don't think that's what they were actually going for. If it is what they were going for, they didn't quite stick the landing. Instead, I agree with the general consensus that Claire wasn't a character so much as a plot device to show that Carmy struggles with work-life balance. I feel like they could've gone, "Hey look, Carmy struggles with work-life balance" while also going, "Hey look, Carmy's been abused and doesn't have much experience with recognizing healthy relationships, and these are some red flags that the audience is supposed to notice that Carmy doesn't notice, and this romantic relationship could've turned abusive if it went on too long and Carmy was right to wait for the shoe to drop because it would've motherfucking dropped (just not in the way Carmy expedcted), but Carmy didn't handle the breakup well, and Claire's feelings were hurt, and Claire is a person with a history and she's probably got her own reasons for acting the way she does." I know for a fact the writers would've been able to handle that, and I think it would've told a much better story. But instead they decided to stop at, "Hey look, Carmy struggles with work-life balance" without delving into Claire at all.

[nancylou444]

April 28, 2015

OP is still around. Here’s some “highlights” of that post:

I don’t recall anybody liking Cole, so that’s a poor example of a character that some might like. 

Again, I don’t recall anybody wanting Dean to hurt Claire. 

Not seeing a connection between liking the MAIN character and disliking a side character being anything but DISLIKING THAT CHARACTER. 

And in case you are wondering, YES they’re a heller. 

[strawberryscare]

can’t stop thinking abt the only time we see carmy wear a The Beef tshirt is when he cooks dinner for claire. you know, the piece of clothing he refused for all of season 1 (when their restaurant was Actually called that) and asked everyone else to switch OUT of (to white shirts and blue aprons).

something something claire fundamentally does not allow carmy to grow as a person + represents carmy’s backsliding into his past something

[thoughtfulchaos773]

Gnarly things

Unassorted dialogue from 2x05 Pop that I want to make note of:

1. Claire: I'm a horrible driver, but I enjoy the risk of it.

2. Carmy: How gnarly is residency?

Claire: It's uh gnarly like you cannot imagine

Carmy: Right, cause everything I heard about it sounds really gnarly, like really gross. I don't know. You must really love it. You know, especially considering how gnarly and gross it is

Claire: Isn't a restaurant gnarly and gross?

3. Claire: Mikey was cool like he'll set something on fire cool.

4. Then there's the friend at the party "addiction is a disease"

5. "Classic Logan you are fucked up."

Addictions, fire, injuries, risky driving

Its like all this ugly dialogue (gnarly things) masked in romantic episode.

I have a theory where Carmy dated Claire subconsciously as a way to create chaos in his life. It's like a defense mechanism for all the positive changes happening since he met syd. Pretty much a majority of season 2 was Carmy answering to unprocessed positive emotions (joy. Amusement, love) until he was forced in the walk-in to see all the chaos he created.

[inlovewhithafairytale]

POV: The Winchester's have a little sister

[portraitofariel]

Controversial Post

Carmy used Claire.

An opinion I have yet to come across in the discourse regarding the dreaded Carmy/Claire pairing is the following--Carmy was fully content never calling/making Claire his girlfriend. Because he never had to do anything to get her to like him. She provided pussy, car rides, an ear to bounce ideas off of, no resistance or intellect, and no effort he had to put in.

Allow me to elaborate.

From their first interaction at the market to the moment in the walk-in, Claire has been a nuisance in his life. She consistently disregarded his boundaries in the following ways:

Ignoring the fact that he struggled to remember her name; there's also no mention of her last name to this day.

Misreading their initial conversation at said market and not reading his body language for what it was: a lack of interest in her. If a woman has to ask a man for his number and he doesn't ask for hers, he isn't interested in pursuing things further. Argue amongst yourselves about that.

Numbergate. In the real world, this would be extremely concerning. Skirting around someone's clear sign they don't like you by giving you a fake number is a huge red flag. It screams desperation and a lack of self-respect. Who chases a man that purposely obstructs their advances then goes to his good friend to extract information? Shame on Fak as well for giving out Carm's private information to a woman he hasn't mentioned in five years. wtf Fak.

When she does call him, she badgers him to get a clear answer as to why he gave her a fake number, instead of taking the hint when she realized it was fake. Once again not taking his hesitance while dictating the numbers to her as a sign he doesn't want her.

"Speaking of dead brothers, do you wanna go to a party?" wtf even was this. By Claire's own admission, she and Carmy never talked in their youth. She essentially hung around his family but never interacted with him so why is she so obsessed with him? I will never understand this. Her tasteless attempt at breaking the ice regarding Mikey's death is so heavy-handed and odd.

Freezergate. Even before she found out he was stuck in the walk-in, what was Claire's urgency to get to back-of-house? Why would she think it would ever be appropriate to just walk back there? Sugar's husband, Pete, has never done that in the show so what makes Claire think she's special enough to do so? I always wonder what might have happened had Sydney been back there when Claire crossed that boundary.

Now the juicy part. Unpacking Carmy's disinterest.

Ever notice that Carmy only ever asked her surface-level questions about her life? He never asked about her interests outside of work, her family, her passions, her last name, or anything else. The entire relationship is on Carmy's terms/timeline. Nothing we've seen on-screen indicates he's been to her apartment or hung out with her friends (aside from that one juvenile ass party in 2x05). Every time they have sex, it's at his place. The overwhelming majority of their conversations center around his needs/grievances about the restaurant. He never buys her flowers or gifts (cooking dinner one single time doesn't count), never has deep conversations with her about her, nor did he call her his girlfriend until Sydney, of all people, pressured him to do so. The subsequent conversation with Fak, "is Claire my girlfriend? What's a girlfriend?" is bullshit. Carmen has been around couples his whole life. He knows what a girlfriend is. He knows what a wife is. He's a 30+ year old man who surely had romantic interests before and after Claire. He just didn't want her to be his girlfriend until he felt immense pressure from his circle to make her that.

How do I know this? In 24 hours, Carmy went from "I love her a lot" (and this is only after Fak straight up asks him if he loves her) to "I like her". In the course of one day, he went from love to like. That says it all. Not to mention this is after the mother of all panic attacks where his hidden feelings for Syd bubble to the surface. A lot of people forget that Carmy is a man and because of this, he does what men tend to do. Whether he was conscious of it or not, he took advantage of a desperate girl like Claire because she threw herself at him with abandon. She willingly put herself in a position to be used by a man she barely knew, then cried to Richie when things didn't go her way. Their 'relationship' went the way it was always going to go because I'd argue she was never truly his girlfriend. Claire was a stopgap between the restaurant and Carmy running away from his problems.

[mod-doodles]

Stand up Claire…

[eeeeehhhhhkiszka]

Listen, Claire chased Carmy. Carmy gave her the wrong number on purpose and she still pushed her way into his life. She essentially forced him to accept her which is what has happened to Carmy his entire life. He’s basically never chosen anything for himself… he’s just had people push and poke and prod him into “deciding” (not deciding, just doing what’s expected). He became a top chef to spite his brother. He inherited The Beef. He inherited an entire staff. Nothing was what he chose.

Carmy chose Syd. Carmy chose The Bear.

[genericpuff]

The Elephant in the Room - Queer Erasure and Westernization in Lore Olympus (and all its horrid stepchildren)

This is one people have been asking me for a while now, and I've been waiting for the right inspiration to hit, as is required for my ADHD hyperfixation-fueled rants. After recently watching a video that did an objective review of Cait Corrain's Crown of Starlight, I felt now was the time, because Crown of Starlight effectively proves exactly what Lore Olympus - and other Greek myth interpretations like it - has issues with.

And I want to preface this post with one question - why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

Buckle up, because this one's HEFTY.

In that aforementioned review of A Crown of Starlight, there were a lot of points that came up about how Cait wrote the female protagonist - Ariadne, wife of Dionysus - where I immediately stopped and went, "Wait, this sounds awfully familiar."

It should be mentioned briefly for anyone who's unaware - Cait Corrain is an author who was recently (and still) under fire for using sock puppet accounts on GoodReads to intentionally sabotage the ratings of other debut authors, many of whom were her own peers or from the same publishing imprint as her (Del Rey), and most of whom were POC. I mentioned in that previous essay that I just linked that Cait Corrain is a fan of Lore Olympus and decided to give it 5 star ratings from these alt accounts, not just de-legitimizing the reputation of the books she bombed, but also the ones that she praised (including her own book, because of course she had to leave an obvious calling card LMAO). I felt it necessary to tie Cait into my discussion of white feminism in LO and its fanbase because people like Cait are exactly who we're talking about when we dissect the intent and consequences of LO's writing - much of its brand of "feminism" seems to only be catered to a specific kind of woman (i.e. white women who fetishize queer people/relationships) and seem to encourage/embrace violence towards women if those women aren't "behaving correctly" or just aren't fortunate enough to be white and rich - and so Cait choosing to give Lore Olympus 5 stars in her hate-raiding and even have it visibly in the background of her headshot photos was... not exactly disproving my argument that these are the types of people LO caters to and encourages, to say the least.

But then I watched Read with Rachel's "Did It Deserve 1 Star" review of Crown of Starlight and it cemented my assumptions and concerns regarding Cait's intentions and influences even more.

As a brief tangent, I've read A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Claire. It very obviously is using Lore Olympus as its blueprints, but it's not super obvious that if you didn't read Lore Olympus or weren't aware of it, you probably wouldn't notice. It's still not a great book on its own, it's riddled with writing problems, but at least it can call itself its own thing to some degree.

Crown of Starlight is just blatant Lore Olympus fanfiction pretending to be original, even down to its marketing (which I'll get to shortly) but swapping out Hades and Persephone with Dionysus and Ariadne, and setting the entire story in space. Why is it in space? There doesn't seem to be any actual necessary reason for this, it just is, go with it. I'd be willing to accept this because changing up the setting of pre-existing stories can be fun (god knows I loved the premise enough of Lore Olympus being a modern day Greek myth retelling that I had to go and make my own version of it that's still in that modern setting) but as RWR says in her review:

"... we're told that it's the 'island' of Crete, but then we talk about commbands, airlocks, [holo-shields] and it wasn't really written in a way that I felt meshed 'Greek retelling' and 'sci-fi' in a cohesive way."

Needless to say, Crown of Starlight unsurprisingly suffers from the same problems Lore Olympus does, where it will try to "subvert" the original myths by changing their setting and characters and then doing absolutely nothing interesting with them to justify those changes.

To really drive my point home that Crown of Starlight is undoubtedly Lore Olympus fanfiction, Lore Olympus was literally used as a comparison point in Crown of Starlight's marketing which is a fair tactic to use to advertise to a specific niche or demographic, and while some have argued that Cait isn't technically the one to come up with that marketing jargon, it's made much more clear that she used that comparison herself when writing and pitching the book because it is quite literally just Lore Olympus with a different couple in space, right down to the main female protagonist being part of a purity cult. And of course it wouldn't be a bad Wattpad romance if it didn't have our main female protagonist Ariadne talking about how inconvenient her MASSIVE BREASTS are and of COURSE Ariadne is a poor innocent uwu babygirl who needs a man to come in and rescue her from the evil purity cult and of COURSE it hints at them eventually having raunchy sex just for it to wind up being milquetoast bondage and of COURSE it all just winds up taking traditionally queer characters and stories and turning them into this sanitized Disney-esque plotline where the boy and girl were always meant to be together and nothing else matters except their love-

And that, at its core, really just screams "this is bad LO fanfiction". From the stylization of the book's writing which never outgrew its "adorkable fanfiction writing" phase-

"Realizing that I'm being gaslit by my entire world doesn't make it easier to deal with, but hey, at least I still have some part of my soul!" - an excerpt from Crown of Starlight quoted from RWR's review timestamp 13:03

-to the "creative" choices made to turn Ariadne into a chastity cult girl whose resolution is obviously going to be to have what's implied to be dirty raunchy sex just for it to be like... the most tame level one bondage stuff;

-to the classic "she breasted boobily down the stairs" focus on Ariadne's body and breasts and sex appeal that's being kept in check by that pesky purity club.

And that's really disappointing because I had seen people say, "Yeah, Cait did an awful thing and deserves to be removed from her publishing schedule, but it's a shame that that book was written by Cait because it's actually a really good book!" because now it's just making me even more sus of people's Greek myth adaption recommendations (I'm still mad at BookTok for convincing me that A Touch of Darkness was worth reading). All I could think while listening to some of the excerpts quoted by RWR was that if I didn't know about Cait Corrain and read Crown of Starlight blind, I'd undoubtedly assume it was being written by a heterocis guy... but it's in fact being written by a queer woman.

And this is where I segue into talking about the root of this problem, where the calls are really coming from - Lore Olympus and its erasure of queer identities and relationships, despite also being written by a queer woman who should know better.

I could think of no better character to help carry this essay than Eros.

Unlike many of the characters in LO that Rachel has managed to straightwash by changing their motives entirely or straight up changing their identity from the source material (ex. Zeus, Apollo, Crocus who was turned into a flower nymph, Dionysus and Achilles because they're both literally babies, the list goes on), Eros has largely remained the same on paper who had zero reason to not be queer within the story.

Eros is still the god of love in this, he's still a guy and presumed to be an adult, but we NEVER see or explore him having relationships with anyone other than Psyche, aside from a brief mention of organizing orgies in the beginning that's used as a quick joke and then promptly never mentioned again.

Just like with Crown of Starlight and A Touch of Darkness and all these other "dark romance" stories, it's that brand of "pretends to be sexually liberating but isn't actually" writing, where they'll briefly mention orgies or sex-related things and then beat around the bush or avoid involving them entirely like a kid at Sunday school who doesn't want to say the word "penis".

(fr out of all the corny and awful slang for genitals I've seen used in stories like this, "a certain part of my anatomy" is definitely one of the most boring and stupid, like for god's sakes Hades you're both adults and at the beginning of this comic you thought she wanted to bang in the kitchen, why are you suddenly talking like a 7 year old boy LOL)

All that aside, while Eros might still be hinted at being queer and sex-positive, it's only as vaguely as possible so that the story can quickly move on to focus on him and Psyche or, better yet, Hades and Persephone. When Eros isn't deadset on finding Psyche, he's being the gay best friend for Persephone, who he has NO right having a friendship with when he introduced himself by intentionally getting her as drunk as possible with the intent of dumping her in Hades' car as per his mom's command. It's brushed off later as "well Aphrodite maaade him do it, for Psycheee!" but Eros still agreed to potentially put Persephone in danger over a relationship that had NOTHING to do with her and was also mostly his fault in its fallout (which Artemis calls him out for, but of course, like all the other times characters have called out the actual issues in the story they're inhabiting, they get brushed aside so that Persephone can talk about Hades):

Now, the Eros and Psyche plotline is one I've talked about before here and not the focus of this essay so I'll keep this tangent brief, but it's absolutely wild to me that Rachel took a story about a woman going to the ends of the earth to prove her love for someone whose trust she broke (a common theme in a lot of Greek myth stories, such as the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice) and turned it into... woman of color gets turned into a nymph slave for Aphrodite to 'test' Eros, a test that isn't clear at all in what it's trying to achieve, and wait hold up, didn't Eros actually fail that test by kissing Ampelus while completely unaware that it was Psyche-

This is just that episode of Family Guy where Peter justifies emotionally cheating and eventually physically cheating on Lois because "well you were the phone sex lady the whole time so no harm done!", isn't it? (×﹏×)

Anyways. It's all very convenient that the comic will hint at queer rep just to either have it be a constant question of whether or not they're actually queer (ex. Morpheus) OR to have it be promptly swept under the rug to make way for other characters/plot points. It's like when mongie tried to be "inclusive" by writing a stereotypical vaguely Asian character with no specific ethnicity just to get angry at her fanbase for calling her out on this that you can't just call a vaguely Asian character "representation" of anything (because Asia is MASSIVE and covers so many different ethnicities and languages and cultures).

Eros is only as gay as he needs to be to fill the role of "gay best friend" for Persephone.

Krokos is no longer a male lover of Hermes but a flower nymph created by Persephone because... apparently we can't dare imply that Hermes would be into anyone besides his unrequited childhood love, Persephone.

Achilles is introduced as a baby even though it makes no sense in the comic's own timeline where Odysseus is presumably already a well-known hero in Olympus, so much so that he was invited to the Panathenea.

Apollo is turned into a flat-out rapist who's only concerned with getting Persephone at all costs and when that doesn't work, he tries to get ANOTHER flower nymph (Daphne) who's actually genuinely interested in him (contrary to the original myth, there's that "swap it subversion" Rachel is known for) to cut her hair so she'll resemble Persephone more because we can't have a single plot point not resolve around Persephone.

Despite there being loads of genderbent characters already, Morpheus is supposedly the only one we're supposed to assume is specifically trans and not just a gender-flipped version of a Greek myth character. Why? Not because Rachel stated so explicitly, not because the comic has actually explored her identity as a trans woman, but because the readers just assumed it in good faith and Rachel was clearly fine with taking credit for trans representation that's only there via assumption (and only confirmed via her mods in Discord, which is... not how you establish canon information in your comic, Rachel.)

Hestia and Athena are part of a chastity club, until uh oh how convenient that they're secretly in a relationship with each other even though it further vilifies them and their morals, particularly Hestia who was promptly called out for being a hypocrite for taking Persephone's coat gifted to her from Hades while secretly being in a relationship the whole time. Not only does the Hestia and Athena relationship manage to commit queer erasure - of two gods who are considered icons in the aroace communities - but it also makes the only two lesbians in the story come across as assholes AND ON TOP OF THAT ALSO manages to somehow invalidate queer sex and relationships as being legitimate due to the even deeper implication that breaking their chastity vows "doesn't count" because it's not a male x female relationship. It's the 'ole poophole loophole all over again.

And then there's Artemis, who has MORE REASON THAN EVER TO BE IN THE PLOT but keeps being conveniently ignored. Her finding out about Hestia and Athena doesn't get any more screentime than her going "oh you're in a relationship, okay" , we never see her question the true intentions of TGOEM or what it means to her, we never see her have any opportunity to carve out her identity beyond just being Apollo's twin sister (it tries to at times, but then immediately goes nowhere with it, amounting to just poetic word salad), and she really just comes across as what a lot of people assume aroace people to be - alone and standoffish, because obviously someone who's nice and a good person would be in a relationship, there has to be a reason they don't want to have sex or fall in love, and that reason obviously has to be that they just hate everyone and want to be alone forever (￢_￢;) Then again, like many of the queer characters in LO, I don't know if I can definitively call her aroace because it's kept as vague as possible, and - going by Rachel's answers to these questions way back in her Tumblr era - apparently people can't be gay and ace at the same time-

There are undoubtedly loads more examples that I could cover here but that goes for practically any essay I write about LO - the more you peel it apart, the more you start unearthing some really questionable and frankly mean-spirited stuff. Queer people feel largely ignored in LO, alongside many of its derivative offspring such as A Touch of Darkness and Crown of Starlight, and it really speaks to how so many people - queer women, no less - have somehow managed to bastardize and sanitize what were traditionally very queer stories with queer characters. It's like these people think "olden times" and can only get as far as "women were slaves and men were rich assholes". Like, yeah, okay, that was the case for many cultures, but not all of them, and for some of them it wasn't as clear cut as that, many had misogynist power struggles in them while also still celebrating women and queer people in their own way. Greek myth is full of stories of women being forced into marriage or being made the victims of assault, but many of them are supportive of women and their struggles, unlike works like LO that somehow manage to be less feminist and sympathetic to women and queer people than these works from thousands of years ago.

This is another topic that's surely meant for another post, but it really speaks not only to the straightwashing and whitewashing of Greek myth, but also the Westernizing of it. That's not to say Rachel Smythe and Cait Corrain and Scarlett St. Claire are intentionally trying to whitewash another culture's works here, but if you're raised predominantly on Western media, you're undoubtedly going to absentmindedly adopt ideas about society that are primarily molded around Western beliefs .

And this is apparent in LO, while Rachel is from New Zealand, you can tell she grew up on a lot of Western media and its influences are sorely showing through LO's worldbuilding, character designs, and narrative choices. That "modern setting" that I mentioned before is much less Greek and a lot more adjacent to The Kardashians which lends to the theories that most of the media that Rachel consumes is American. Rather than actually going to the effort of doing her research on Greek culture, she seems to just prefer defaulting to the easiest assumption of how modern society is across the board - a generic Los Angeles clone with big glass skyscrapers and pavement walkways. She rarely ever draws food or clothing from those time periods; despite this story being about gods she's spent so little time on the people who passed on the stories about those gods, the mortals, and the gods themselves rarely feel like gods, rather just like Hollywood celebrities covered in body paint. The clothing feels very generic and uninspired with often very little Greek influence, even though Greek clothing is designed around Mediterranean living which you could do a lot with, to such an egregiously Western degree that Hades and Persephone's wedding was Christian-coded. The food... well, there ISN'T any because as we've seen, like the stereotypical American child, Persephone apparently only wants chicken nuggies and Skittles for dinner, so we never see her eat; and not only do we not see Persephone eat, but Rachel weirdly tries to use Persephone's vegetarianism as some kind of anti-capitalist characterization when much of the Greek diet is predominantly vegetarian. It's NOT HARD or uncommon to be a vegetarian in Greece!

(it looks like they're literally all eating the same thing so IDK what Hera is referring to here, it looks like they're all eating toast and lettuce LMAO)

All that's to say, much of LO - and the books like it that I've gone over here - are written with this idea that every culture - including the one that it's trying to adapt - was subject to the same ideas that Western culture lives by in the modern day - that being a vegetarian is "counterculture" in every culture, that the notion of sexual purity is enforced in the same way it's enforced in the Western education system (cough Christianity cough), that queer or otherwise "unconventional" relationships should stay inside the bedroom and not be seen. As much as Rachel claims she wants to "fight the patriarchy" and "deconstruct purity culture", all she winds up doing is reinforcing it through a Westernized lens, which is, as I've talked about before, very indicative of right-leaning white feminism and what it embraces and promotes - being a "good woman" who follows the rules and willingly becomes part of the system that's oppressing them because that's what "good women" do. Women who are confidant in their sexuality are evil and should be shunned for being "sluts". Women who are in relationships with other women "don't count" as real relationships the same way heteronormative relationships do, and cannot be trusted because they're likely trying to spread an agenda that's designed to brainwash heterocis women. Women should only aim to achieve marriage and their entire personality has to be built around their true love. Women are allowed to be kinky, but only as kinky as roleplaying the exact same gender structures that puts the man in a position to dominate a woman, and it should always and only ever be with her first love who she marries immediately, no one else.

This is exactly what the critics are getting at when they hold LO - and its creator - accountable for the messages it's been sending for five years to its audience of middle aged women and young girls. Having a demographic is fine, if this were just a comic for girls it would be fine, but it becomes a lot more problematic when that demographic is being fed toxic power fantasy stories based on a culture that's being gentrified and sanitized of all its original messaging and characterization right before our eyes. It feels blatantly misinformed from the very beginning in its intention to be a "feminist retelling" of Greek myth, because somehow Lore Olympus manages to be less feminist than these stories drafted and written by men from 2000+ years ago.

I opened this essay with a question: why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

I think cases like these really highlight how deep the heteronormative brainwashing from childhood onward goes. That, despite these writers being queer or women, still manage to reinforce the same ideas and tropes and harmful predisposed notions that were designed to be used explicitly against queer people and women. These are things that we can't ever stop challenging, and asking, and truly deconstructing, because it runs deep in many of us who grew up on popular media even as innocent as Disney. Learning about more complex social concepts like sexism and misogyny and queerphobia doesn't automatically absolve us of those very same biases that have been both blatantly and subtly ingrained into us since childhood. All that said, Rachel being bisexual does not mean she's not capable of straightwashing; Cait Corrain being a queer debut author with a POC main character didn't stop them from targeting other POC debut authors at their own imprint; being part of any minority group or identifier does not automatically protect you from perpetuating the cycle that you, too, likely had enforced upon you at some point or another in your life. The fact that these creators and writers are still perpetuating that cycle to begin with is indicative of why it's a cycle at all - it takes work to break on a subconscious level because those cycles are specifically designed to target and hijack the subconscious.

At its worst, do you really think Lore Olympus can claim to be a feminist retelling that's "deconstructing purity culture" when the creator herself admittedly never fully identified or understood sexism until her mid-30's and has the audacity to say her audience is "harsh" on the female characters that she constantly vilifies through her own narrative?

"I feel like female characters in general, people will be a little harsher on them and sometimes way harsher on them, and I used to be like.. before I started writing the story and like making a story I was like yeah, sexism is not that bad, and [now] I was like oh it's bad. It's quite bad [laughs], so like, I don't know, I feel like the female characters in the story don't get so much of a pass. But this isn't consistent across the board, it's not all the time" - Rachel Smythe, in an interview with Girl Wonder Webtoon Podcast

If Lore Olympus truly was just a series meant to be for fun "no thoughts head empty" drama and spice, that would be fine. I've said it time and time before on this blog and I'll say it again: I wouldn't have an issue if Rachel was just writing a story exclusively revolving around heterocis men and women. I'm just frustrated and tired and annoyed that she keeps lying about it, and doubly so that this comic and its creator who claim to be "feminist" have inspired other people in the same headspace to continue to perpetuate that cycle through works that are clearly inspired by LO and never challenged the things LO promoted - violence towards "unconventional" women, violence towards POC, and erasure of queer people. And worst of all, for writers like Cait Corrain, it's more than just writing a really bad book with really bad messaging, it's going so far as intentionally targeting those same groups of people that are regularly vilified in works like LO - people who are just existing, who don't pose a threat to anyone, but had the misfortune of becoming the target of a white woman's insecurity.

I don't know what the answer to this problem is. I don't know what form the solution will come in, if any, to address the ongoing issues with Greek myth adaptions that are being sorely written through an "America as the default" point of view and praised for "rewriting the script of Greek mythology", quite literally cultural appropriation happening live right before our eyes all for the sake of cheap entertainment. Maybe it'll take the failings of works like Crown of Starlight to really get people talking about it. But so long as the roots of these works - such as Lore Olympus - are still being protected and marketed en masse by the same kinds of people who don't see the issue in Americanizing other cultures and their stories, then Lore Olympus and Crown of Starlight will not be the last ones to cause harm to the source material - and the cultures that source material is born from and a part of - they're taking from.

I opened this post with a question, and I'm going to close it with another to really leave it as food for thought. That question comes from another video that I'll link here for you to watch at your convenience that spends even more time diving into and discussing the nature of works like this that have seemingly attempted to "deconstruct" the very dogmas that they still wind up reinforcing all the same.

Does the romance genre have a white supremacy problem?

(yes. yes, it does.)

[nancylou444]

March 18, 2015

Claire was bought back for one reason and one reason ONLY, to give Cass a storyline. 

It made NO sense for her to be buddies with her father’s murderer.