#he’s a god in a Greek tragedy

[sporkberries]

There goes Antigone, off to pray

[yea-baiyi]

i keep thinking about the odyssey i am THINKING about wei wuxian as odysseus. you were dead. its been years since you’ve seen your family. the child you left behind is almost a man. you wear a face they don’t recognise, you sneak in through the back door. the dog gives your identity away. the world knows it’s you when you draw your weapon. the person you love recognises you by the original symbol of your love—a secret that no one else in the world knows about, still, because they kept it safe for all these years. you get the chance to go back and despite everything, you found home waiting for you; he kept your place and raised your son and he was still there waiting for you when you got back. tell me o muse, about a complicated man i am extremely not okay

[hermesmoly]

rate all the greek mytho married couples from most to least interesting (or your favorite to least favorite, depends on you!)

For fun I’ve split them into four categories:

The Really Interesting category, made their relationship everyone’s problem:

- Zeus and Hera (duh)

- Helen and Menelaus (happy ending)

- Helen and Paris (oof! ending)

- Odysseus and Penelope (has a whole word dedicated to their like-minded thinking)

- Rhea and Cronus (tragedy and cannibalism)

- Jason and Medea (tragedy and filicide)

- Clytemnestra and Agamemnon (tragedy and filicide and mariticide and matricide and misogyny and and OH gods-)

- Peleus and Thetis (the arranged mortal marriage blues, but in my head Thetis immortalized Peleus somehow by force and keeps him in her attic) (Because gods be damned if she will be the only one doomed to grieve Achilles)

- Orpheus and Eurydice (mf really went to hell for her and still didn’t get her back :<)

- Hector and Andromache (relatively the most normal ones in this category but still very tragic. Like don’t even ask.)

- Hecuba and Priam (them too)

The Really Cute couple category, bonus if it took them long to get there:

- Hephaestus and Aglaia

- Eros and Psyche

- Dionysus and Ariadne

- Perseus and Andromeda (they kinda remind me of Prince Philip and Aurora which is cute)

- Hebe and Heracles (listennn. they’re cute and important to the Heracles-Hera feud ending)

- Hippomenes and Atalanta (RIP Meleager)

- Philemon and Baucis (one of my fave Zeus myths)

- Alcestis and Admetus (Orpheus and Eurydice but with a happy ending thanks to the interference of Apollo)

- Iphis and Ianthe (trans man rep is good someone PLEASE write about them)

- Tethys and Oceanus (placing them here idc they are cute in my head!! The only titan couple who survived rip to Coeus/Phoebe and all the failed marriages thanks to the Titanomachy)

The Uhhh… Okay Category

- Hades and Persephone (placing them here because while I do think their relationship is interesting AND I find good various retellings of them (excluding LO) like Hades Supergiant, Hadestown, etc I long for more neutral/nuanced takes on the kidnapping, not just by their romance (or lack of romance) but Demeter’s role in the story to be more respected. (It also can’t be helped that HxP has the most over saturated greek mythology content everywhere that people get tired of seeing them, especially portrayed as the “only good greek myth couple” like okay get outta here)

- Gaia and Uranus (I like them, their relationship is clearly important for Cronus’ succession story, but their conflict to me seems so.. short lived? Like you have your son castrate your husband for imprisoning your less appealing babies but now the strife is gone and you work together to tell your son he is destined to be overthrown by his son and telling your grandson to cannibalize his wife as good advice??? Like good for them ig but Rhea and Cronus just do it better imo)

- Hypnos and Pasithea (getting ur wife from a deal with her mom that makes you commit treason by inducing your king with sleep… nothing sketchy about this at allll) (but maybe they’re cute and functional besides that who knows)

- Ceyx and Alcyone (in one version they didn’t do it, in the other they’re just… very dumb to call themselves Zeus and Hera.)

- Procris and Cephalus (eos RUINS lives)

- Hephaestus and Aphrodite (lets be glad it ended bc while they are interesting and Hephaestus did make their marital strife public, I just think they had a better relationship after the divorce)

The Kinda Boring category (to me, subjectively, put down the pitchforks)

- Poseidon and Amphitrite (do they have one myth together that isn’t the Delphin seduction myth… Amphitrite is nice to Poseidon’s worst son. That’s. That’s kinda it. I wish we had more, like how they are with their children or literally anything else to depict a dynamic between them. Especially since they ARE supposed to be the king and queen of the sea. But nope. At least with Oceanus and Tethys they’re both obscure in their personalities so headcanoning stuff is fun to me. Poseidon having a well established personality and Amphitrite… oh dear Amphitrite…)

- Cadmus and Harmonia (they’re a couple in order become ascendants of more tragic humans like Actaeon, Semele and that’s it. They become Snakes in the end to repent for Cadmus’ mistake. Nothing really about their relationship with each other)

- Deucalion and Pyrrha (The Greek rendition of Christianity’s Noah’s Ark and yeah. Thats it)

[rambling-melpomene]

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.”

“He smiled, and his face was like the sun.”

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”

“I found myself wishing he would wake so that I might watch the life return.”

“He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not.”

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”

— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

[greenforestflowers]

I cannot image how difficult Brok’s death must have been for Sindri - losing his family, and knowing he inadvertently denied his brother an afterlife.

But making it worse, the missing soul piece also means that they will never see each other again. Sindri retrieved his brother from the Light because he couldn’t bear to part from him. Ironically - tragically - that decision has now separated both eternally. They could have reunited in the Light one day, if only he’d been able to resist and wait. Now, since Brok’s soul will never find its way there, they’ll be apart forever.

Sindri’s distress and rage is not just over Brok’s death in of itself, not just his guilt at accidentally costing him a life in the Light, but also an utterly unimaginable pain because he will certainly, unalterably, never see his brother again. hopefully he finds comfort in Brok forgiving him

[sad-endings-suck]

Lysander in a nutshell.

Cassius: Lysander, don’t do that.

Lysander: You just don’t understand. In time you will see I am right.

*later*

Lysander: Oh no I was wrong. Cassius is always right.

Cassius: So you will take my advice next time?

Lysander: Absolutely not.

[corvidexoskeleton]

Rethinking the dynamics between kratos and the gods in the og series through the lens of siblings versus their shared dad makes things a lot more, idk, tragic? Kratos starting out as the older brother taking care of his little brother, then going on to seek his own older brother's help, ares trying to train his younger brother so that they could one day take down their shitty dad, and athena just trying to keep things together so that her siblinga don't all gang up on dad and kill him. Theres something about it that makes me sad

[kikiswords]

every day i think about the one conversation between orestes and pylades in orestes by euripedes

[gladiatorcunt]

rafe & ward / apollo & zeus parallels, WALK with me

[justtorzaplease]

One of my favourite greek myths is the one of Apollo and Hyacinth, a gay love story. Or more like tragedy. Hyacinth was a greek prince, and one of the most attractive mortals, withmany admirers, including a few of the gods, Apollo being among them. He and Hyacinth became lovers, Apollo even giving up his lyre and duties at the Temple of Delphi. One day, while playing a game, Apollo was teaching Hyacinth how to use the discus. He accidentally kills him after hitting him in the head, and as Hyacinth lays dying, Apollo turns him into the flower of the same name. This way, Hades could not claim his soul. It is widely thought that Apollo had wished to become a mortal so he could live on in death with his lover, but this was impossible due to his immortality. He swore to always remember Hyacinth through his songs and poems.

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

oshi no ko will never be a normal love story. never ever ever ever ever ever ever

[ey-there-little-guy]

hmmm thinking of,,, this g/t spin on a fic idea i had. might just stay a concept but... god AU c!tntduo with god of the moon g!wilbur and t!quackity who's fiances left him. very heartbroken very angry just speaking his woes to the night sky like he's been prone to.

and g!wilbur up there in the sky, having listened to every rant listening to this one with a dreamy sigh like "i could make him better".

Tommy (fellow god of the sun) would pop in with something like "if anything, you'd probably make each other worse." or "oh my gods Wil you're such a wierdo— just go talk to him already if you're gonna be like this again, you're holding up my fucking sunrise."

quackity was not expecting, the night after his broken engagement, for the god of the moon to show up outside his balcony over 50 feet tall to... ask him out? is that what's happening??? what the fuck do you mean you've been listening to me—

so. yeah there's a few issues, these guys have problems, but it'd probably be funny.

[that-redheadd]

Trying was Never Enough

…for him at least.

I was quite the contrast next to her. She’s a pretty tragedy, written and created carefully with love and melancholy by all the poetic and literary greats. She was romanticised while I was pushed aside. A villain and an antihero, a moth and a butterfly, a wolf and a lamb, the stars and the moon. Both tragic and sad but only one is wanted.

So I thought that if I put my roughness in a box and locked it deep inside of me, clipped my sharp edges, I’d soft, inviting, nurturing; better and warmer than her. But the roughness didn’t fit the box, it broke out, my edges grew back, and my efforts were never acknowledged.

So I’ve made peace with my ugliness, my loneliness and that in this world, the people will never be able to handle the dark, sick and twisted characters in a book but only the soft, romantic, and vulnerable ones.

[yugiohz]

so what are your thoughts on the jojo myth 🗣🤔🎤🎤

I basically rlly like how Araki keeps emphasizing that jjba is a visual story to him, his character designs stand out a lot and his comments on the jojo aesthetic kinda encourage you to read the visual of the joestars and co. as a diegetic element as well i.e. they do not only look eccentric to the reader, but to in-universe characters as well. if you pay attention to the background characters you’ll notice that most do look very normal and I am convincedddd they look at anasui dio etc. and think they look weird as hell because as Araki says, his characters are very very specific people that are bound to their very very specific time and place and it’s kind of impossible to place them outside of their context, which is why I’m not really upset about a LOT of major characters dying, it’s like they exist just to tell this story/be part of a bizarre (😂) story and as soon as that is done? they cease to exist and become part of the myth and thus this eternal past, there simply is no tangible future for a lot of these people they are not intended to be normal people they were doomed from the start because their nucleus is the mythical!!!

[loserboyfriendrjl]

orpheus had lost his euridyce, the same way that dorcas had lost their marlene; their love cut short, and bittersweet.

and, the same way orpheus did, dorcas knelt down to the pits of the inferno and, with vengeance burning in their blood and death in their hands, they went down for marlene. to bring her back, bring her back to them, to continue their story, to continue their love; and if they couldn't bring her back, they'd look for her memory.

dorcas went down just like holy mary, just like orpheus, but it was all with a price. think back on love, and never get it back. her memory burnt in their head, her lips against their neck, and for then, that was enough.

but the whispers grew louder and louder, dorcas, dorcas, dorcas, a chant of love, and, just once, they looked back. they looked back for marlene, to see her once more, give them one last kiss, one last glance. and for them, that was the end. they'd never see her again. they would be just another greek tragedy.

[noxtivagus]

i love the sky so much