#polydectes

[sarafangirlart]

Perseus by Howard Pyle

Well that’s just straight up horror art lol

[aliciavance4228]

I hate hate HATE the way the entire Polydectes situation was treated in this retelling.

In Shadow of Perseus Polydectes not only that has a tragic background story (being a man who worked hard and won people's trust in order to become king and then tragically lost his wife and daughter) in order to appear more sympathetic, but it gets to a point where Danaë herself wants to marry him and we're supposed to appreciate him even more for willingly wanting to marry a woman above 35 with a child. 🙄

The sanitization of his character is just another way the author proves not only that her irrational hatred towards Perseus made her portray the actual big bad guy and final boss in a good light, but also that she doesn't understand how does abuse work. Polydectes wanted to marry Danaë against her own will and then, after she rejected him, he planned to send Perseus on a safe suicide mission in order to marry her, in some source he goes far enough to rape or enslave her. Just because she's not your conventional victim because she wasn’t young neither childless that doesn’t mean that her trauma is less important. Not to mention the fact that people tend to hyperfixate on physical appearence and claim that Danaë couldn't have been desired because she was no longer beautiful enough, when in most cases the most common reason behind SA is NOT sexual attraction but domination or control, and in this case particularly we have a man in power being uncapable of accepting that a single mother and vulnerable woman such as Danaë would refuse the advances of a goddamn king.

Speaking about Danaë, I find it deeply ironic that a so-called Feminist Retelling wasn't able to acknowledge the fact that a woman choosing not to marry even the king of an island despite of currently living in a fisherman's household and probably confronting her with the social stigma of being an unmarried woman Ancient Greece was ahead of those times. Danaë was actually the type of woman who didn't desire a husband even for a higher social status or financial stability, and you're here having her fall in love with that piece of shit because... because?!

Next we have Perseus, who, being the male guardian of his mother, feels entitled to her and doesn't allow her to marry Polydectes because he knows that he will become her protective figure then. It gets to a point of over-possessiveness that gives Perseus some freudian tendencies, even having him claiming that Polydectes wants to keep his mother all for himself. Which not only that is disgusting af, but directly erases the most important aspect of Perseus and Danaë's relationship from the original myths, namely that Perseus cared for his mother's wishes and would've done anything she wanted him to do. In some versions he doesn't even despise Polydectes but perceives him as a father-figure (before he betrayed him), and the only reason why he disapproved this marriage was because his mother didn't want to marry him.

Turning back to Polydectes it is deeply frustrating to see how he convinces Danaë to sent Perseus far away for an year so that he could get rid of him, marry his mother and bang her in the meantime just like in the original myth, yet somehow his actions are still sanitized and Perseus is still the supreme evil guy in this story. He even leaves Danaë pregnant so that his death could be perceived as more disturbing by readers than it should've been because now Perseus left his unborn half-brother fatherless just like him. Again, what was in the writer's mind when she decided that said pregnancy would be a brilliant idea?!

[scuorge10]

Working on some designs here is Polydectes, Acrisius and Danaë

[galusandmalus]

athena and perseus are truly brother and sister coded wait i guess they are just brother and sister

u get the idea they reflect each others poses and personality and its sweet

[just-1-scorpio]

Everytime someone writes Perseus as a arogant jerk, who killed Medusa for glory, seperet him from Andromeda, potray them in an unhappy marrige, ereases Danae or Andromeda and they trauma, ereases Euryale and Stheno, or show Polydectes and Phineus is a good light in anything, an angle loses it's wings.

[kingbryancroidragon]

People who villainize Perseus refuse to acknowledge that Perseus being tasked with bringing back the head of Medusa was from everyone's perspective an impossible task. It wasn't just Medusa being able to turn people into stone, she had two unkillable sisters named Stheno and Euryale. Even in the event that you did manage to kill Medusa, do you really think you'd manage to escape with your life after that? The reason Polydectes gave Perseus this task was because he didn't expect Perseus to come back.

[my-wuthering-bookshelf]

Alright, I am SO MAD at Polydectes. He embodies toxic masculinity and is a symbol of supremacist men thinking everything is dued to them. It makes me so sick.

[sarafangirlart]

I think the worst example of this is The Shadow of Perseus, where Danaë actually WANTS to marry Polydectes (even tho 99% of ancient sources say otherwise) and Perseus was just being overprotective so Polydectes just HAD TO send him away to learn to become a man and just let his mom do what she wants… as if mythology Perseus wasn’t protecting his mother’s choice not to marry.

That same retelling has Phineus be around Andromeda’s age and not be her uncle, and Andromeda actually wanted to marry Phineus and sacrifice herself… even tho again, the mythology says no such thing.

It reminds me of something someone else said “does this female character really not have agency or is she just using her agency to do something you don’t like?”, Danaë loved and protected Perseus, with what little we see of her in mythology we know she is strong willed, she made the choice to not marry Polydectes and Perseus protects her choice, so bc her character makes Perseus look like a good guy she has to be changed and declawed to make Perseus an evil bastard.

Hi so, you’ve commented on my post a while back where I was complaining about how badly a retelling was writing Danaë and by extension Perseus, basically blaming her for how “bad” he turned out. You mentioned that these retellings have this weird hatred against mothers and motherhood, specifically with lore Olympus, could you elaborate on that when it comes to Perseus and Danaë?

I’ve noticed retellings being “sympathetic” to Danaë but making her a weak and pathetic boy mom who can’t control her child, when mythology Danaë was cunning, with how she managed to hide Perseus from Acrisius for years before they got caught, as well as assertive and brave, rejecting Polydektes advances no matter how much he pressured or threatened her.

I'll try my best to answer this since I haven't really engaged with many of the retellings regarding Perseus. I've just seen what you've found and shown. But so far, from what I've seen from writers writing Danaë is that she is rather weak as a mother and has allowed Perseus to be cruel and assault others when that never happened, or the things that has happened with her weren't really that bad and that Perseus was just overreacting. I believe there was one where it just said that Perseus shouldn't worry about her being married off against her will because she's too old for that to happen(???).

Rewriting Perseus to be the antagonist of the tale will always take Danaë down with him. Since she was such a big figure in his life, it is impossible to talk about him without talking about her and how she affected him to be the person he was during the time of the Medusa myth. So disrespecting motherhood is inevitable when it comes to rewriting Perseus since you are now erasing how much of a great mother Danaë was. It's unintentional disrespect, if anything.

And I see a lot of those who don't write but believe that Medusa was an innocent victim, dismiss the fact that Perseus killed to save Danaë, and say she would've been fine.

[sarafangirlart]

Dictys and Clymene, the couple that took in Perseus and Danaë.

I’ve kinda been going back and forth on their backstory but here it is so far (keep in mind I’m making up 99% of this stuff bc we barely know anything about them as characters): Dictys used to live in the palace of Seriphos as a prince, but was then pushed out by Polydectes bc he wanted the throne without any competition, he was rather subtle and manipulative about it, instead of physically making Dictys leave the throne to him, he coerced him to leave, bringing up their “brotherly bond” and how he doesn’t want them to fight over the throne. Dictys didn’t want a war either so he left, choosing instead to become a humble fisherman.

Clymene was a noblewoman who married Dictys when he still kept his title as prince but remained on his side even in exile, but even after leaving her luxurious life she still likes to doll herself up whenever she can (hence the bronze jewelry), there isn’t much about her in ancient sources unfortunately, it isn’t even directly stated that she’s Dictys wife, it’s only implied bc they share a shrine.

Oh and little Perseus here is developing his love for sea cicadas lol

[aliciavance4228]

I want people to understand the meaning of words before using them.

That's because the author of this retelling calls Perseus an anarchist, because somewhere in the last third of this book he holds a wanna-be deep and motivational speech about Polydectes’ tyranny, and how they must overthrow him. Not only that said discourse is funny af, but at the end of it he claims that Dictys will be chosen as a king in Polydectes’ place. Sorry to burst your bubble, but by the definition, anarchy is a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems or the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government. Perseus didn't have any intention in changing the political system (in this case a monarchy), but replace a corrupt monarch with a more capable one. By your own logic Ancient Rome would've been an anarchy as well considering the amount of leaders that were murdered and replaced every weak.

It's thousands of times more ironic considering the fact that Perseus himself becomes the king of Seriphos at the end of the retelling (a monarch, that is), thus perpetuating the exact same system he's supposed to be against of according to this author.

[scuorge10]

POV: You want to keep your mom safe but this creepy dude wants to marry her

[galusandmalus]

what fascinates me about perseus in Renaissance to the 1800s is the emphasis on the despair of perseus when polydectes tricks him. like he doesn't think he will live, he doesn't know how to save his mom, and he's crashing out. my baby 😭

[margaretkart]

Perseus and Andromeda

[amorphousbl0b]

And actually, I need to make an addendum on this post. What’s incredible to me about his tale is that, either by coincidence or intentional editing, these two plotlines line up perfectly in theme.

Perseus goes on his adventure to save his mother from a marriage that she doesn’t want, right? But Andromeda’s story is, while not centered on it, importantly tied to the same kind of plot. Something not-that-often discussed is that she’s betrothed to a much older man — her uncle in fact — when Perseus finds her. Phineas becomes rageful that this stranger might be taking away his wife-to-be and, despite having not lifted a finger to save her from the ketos, he still wants to possess her.

But Andromeda doesn’t want to be married to her dad’s brother, cuz that’s gross and Phineas in particular is a nasty piece of shit, so Perseus kills him.

Suddenly there’s a strong parallel between these two distinct adventures. In both, Perseus responds to a woman not wanting to be married — even though it is well within the respective monarchs’ legal right to choose a subject or to marry off their daughter — by siding with the woman and killing the suitor. The theme of Perseus being a defender of women extends throughout his story. And that’s a fascinating throughline that, given the analysis I just wrote, is hard to tell whether was accidental or on purpose.

Something fascinating about Perseus is that his famous journey is a stitching-together of two separate myths.

First he kills Medusa, then on the way back he takes a random diversion to slay a Ketos and rescue Andromeda. This is hardly unusual for Greek stories, which often feature random diversions, but what interested me is that both seem to actually be explanations for things rather than the usual “a hero killed a monster here and that’s why these particular random crossroads are cool and important” formula these things follow.

First, the story of Perseus and Medusa is connected to the image of the Gorgon, a heavily widespread artistic motif. The gorgoneia are hideous heads that adorn architecture, shields, and coins all over Archaic and Classical Greece. They seem to have served a similar function to gargoyles in Christian myth, driving off evil spirits with their fearsome visage. And Perseus cutting the head from Medusa was the tale of how that icon came to be. Well, that might be a bit backwards: the story would’ve been around for quite a while during the Dark Age before it was written down in the 7th century BCE, around the time those gorgoneia started appearing.

Andromeda is entirely unconnected to this except by the single thread of Perseus himself. This is epitomized, in my opinion, by the recurring indecision over whether Perseus killed the ketos with his sword or with Medusa’s head. Did he even have Medusa’s head in the early tellings of the story? Were they connected later? Because what’s interesting about the story of Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, and Cetus, is that you might recognize all of those names from the stars. Every single character in this myth was a constellation!

Except Phineas, screw him I guess.

Of note, none of the characters from the Medusa adventure are constellations. Not Danaë or Polydectes or Dictys or Medusa herself, all of whom were much more important to Perseus’s life than Cepheus who did absolutely nothing even in the one story where he matters. Unlike Heracles, whose whole life is an extended constellation myth, Perseus has this one incident, but it’s a dense one, producing five whole star formations from a single monster fight.

It’s hard to figure out when and from what this would’ve arisen, given all these transformations happened during the Dark Age before the reinvention of writing. Nonetheless, this is a great example of the evolution that I find incredibly compelling about studying mythology. Every tale has its seams, stitches haphazard or clean, reminders that this was a living culture and all of these stories we might fall into the trap of treating as fun fictions with quirky characters were as real as any of our modern religious texts and histories.

[deliajackson]

Even if there is a lot of things I dislike in Rick's Writing

I love the parallels between

Percy - Sally - Gabe

Perseus - Danae - Polydectes

Everything is perfect. Top tier, Rick. Congratulations.

[sarafangirlart]

I definitely talked about this before but the “for her beauty she was raped, for her ugliness she was murdered” always gave me the ick, it’s simply not rooted in reality. It implies that only conventionally attractive women get assaulted, which is a horrible way to view how assault works bc it’s basically stating that rape is mainly about lust, it’s not, it’s about power, it’s violating another person’s bodily autonomy to exert your power over them, anyone regardless of how beautiful or ugly they are can get raped.

It’s ironically another way Danaë is sidelined, hell in “Stone Blind” Medusa straight up rambles about how Perseus was antagonistic towards Polydectes for no reason bc he was never “actually” interested in Danaë bc she’s an older woman and single mother and she’s just not attractive, I wish I was making that up but I’m not and ppl are praising this book for how feminist it is. The fact that Danaë is an older woman matters to her story (at youngest she’d be in her mid to late 30s), back then (and even now) youth was viewed in high regard, yet Danaë isn’t youthful anymore, she’s “past her prime” so to speak but a powerful man like Polydectes still wanted to either enslave or marry her, bc again it’s not about lust it’s about power, it wouldn’t be far fetched to say that he wanted her bc she rejected him and he just couldn’t handle that, he can’t stand that a poor abandoned woman would not be interested in him, the king and wealthiest man in the island.