#retelling history

[tuurverheydepoetryandprose]

I don’t know if it’s cultural/latent Christianity or just standard media illiteracy, but people need to seriously read up on the nature of mythology in ancient cultures. Like seriously.

So many people treat myths as factual accounts of events. I have never seen any literary scholar, anthropologist or historian make the claim that this was the way the ancients viewed their myths. It’s metaphor. It’s allegory. It’s symbolism. It’s a narrativised ritual. It’s artistic social, political, cultural commentary, instruction or expression. The claim that a myth should be interpreted literally is never made by serious researchers, because it

1) is inherently unprovable and unarguable, which renders it scientifically irrelevant.

2) it blocks off many more salient interpretations that can co-exist with other contradictory non-literal interpretations.

3) it does not seem consistent with the way myth was treated by storytellers and scholars of the time.

Myth is an inherently flexible medium. It’s beautiful and elegant in its manifold meanings. Stop trying to make it a literal account. It isn’t. Never has been. Do your research about the culture, the medium and the traditions you discuss, before making wild statements, before writing ahistorical retellings, or trying to cancel gods or the people who follow them, based on texts that were written (and before that orally handed down) thousands of years ago in a cultural tradition entirely different than ours.

STOP PROJECTING YOUR OWN LITERALISM AND REJECTION OF COMPLEXITY ON OTHER CULTURES.

It’s ignorant, it’s incurious, it’s incorrect and frankly disrespectful, racist and colonialist to insert your misunderstood notion of mythology in a culture that you have barely researched.

Some people need to be a bit less concerned with being seen as perfect paragons of moral righteousness, and a bit more with not spreading misinformation, cultural ignorance and media illiteracy.

[tellmeomuse]

And In The Night, I See The Stars

Phaidros is a sailor whose heart belongs more to the sea than any one port, and he’s spent his entire life being blown from place to place. But after being falsely accused of a crime in King Minos’s court, he finds himself locked away in a labyrinth that he may never escape. The halls of Minos’s maze are said to be haunted by a fearsome beast, one that feasts on the flesh of men, but Phaidros quickly learns that what is said is not always what is true — and false accusations may be more common in this kingdom than he’d previously expected.

And In the Night, I See The Stars is a new retelling of an ancient tale that is fully written and currently being serialized on both AO3 and Patreon.

Chapters are posted every Wednesday and Patreon is a week ahead of AO3. There are currently thirteen chapters on AO3 and fourteen on Patreon.

Patreon is also home to:

writer's commentary

in-depth posts about character designs and settings

supplemental scenes that didn't make it into the main story

blogs discussing the historical, mythological, and artistic background that went into the making of this story

If you're curious about all this, why not give the foreword a try? It's called We Must Imagine The Minotaur Loved and it talks about Crete, Athens, the myth of the minotaur, the nature of mythologized history, and why Theseus does not appear in this version of the story.

Anyway, please read AITNISTS on AO3 and Patreon!

I may be biased, but I think it's a really great story. 💜

[greekmythcomix]

How I teach the Iliad in highschool:

I’ve taught the Iliad for over a decade, I’m literally a teacher, and I can even spell ‘Iliad’, and yet my first instinct when reading someone’s opinions about it is not to drop a comment explaining what it is, who ‘wrote’ it, and what that person’s intention truly was.

Agh. <the state of Twitter>

The first thing I do when I am teaching the Iliad is talk about what we know, what we think we know, and what we don’t know about Homer:

We know -

- 0

We think we know -

- the name Homer is a person, possibly male, possibly blind, possibly from Ionia, c.8th/9th C BCE.

- composed the Iliad and Odyssey and Hymns

We don’t know -

- if ‘Homer’ was a real person or a word meaning singer/teller of these stories

- which poem came first

- whether the more historical-sounding events of these stories actually happened, though there is evidence for a similar, much shorter, siege at Troy.

And then I get out a timeline, with suggested dates for the ‘Trojan war’ and Iliad and Odyssey’s estimated composition date and point out the 500ish years between those dates. And then I ask my class to name an event that happened 500 years ago.

They normally can’t or they say ‘Camelot’, because my students are 13-15yo and I’ve sprung this on them. Then I point out the Spanish Armada and Qu. Elizabeth I and Shakespeare were around then. And then I ask how they know about these things, and we talk about historical record.

And how if you don’t have historical record to know the past, you’re relying on shared memory, and how that’s communicated through oral tradition, and how oral tradition can serve a second purpose of entertainment, and how entertainment needs exciting characteristics.

And we list the features of the epic poems of the Iliad and Odyssey: gods, monsters, heroes, massive wars, duels to the death, detailed descriptions of what armour everyone is wearing as they put it on. (Kind of like a Marvel movie in fact.)

And then we look at how long the poems are and think about how they might have been communicated: over several days, when people would have had time to listen, so at a long festival perhaps, when they’re not working. As a diversion.

And then I tell them my old and possibly a bit tortured simile of ‘The Pearl of Myth’:

(Here’s a video of The Pearl of Myth with me talking it through in a calming voice: https://youtu.be/YEqFIibMEyo?sub_confirmation=1

And after all that, I hand a student at the front a secret sentence written on a piece of paper, and ask them to whisper it to the person next to them, and for that person to whisper it to the next, and so on. You’ve all played that game.

And of course the sentence is always rather different at the end than it was at the start, especially if it had Proper nouns in it (which tend to come out mangled). And someone’s often purposely changed it, ‘to be funny’.

And we talk about how this is a very loose metaphor for how stories and memory can change over time, and even historical record if it’s not copied correctly (I used to sidebar them about how and why Boudicca used to be known as ‘Boadicea’ but they just know the former now, because Horrible Histories exists and is awesome)

And after all that, I remind them that what we’re about to read has been translated from Ancient Greek, which was not exactly the language it was first written down in, and now we’re reading it in English.

And that’s how my teenaged students know NOT TO TAKE THE ILIAD AS FACT.

(And then we read the Iliad)

[leannareneehieber]

GOTHIC & DARK ACADEMIA ENTHUSIASTS!

DARLINGS! Just noticed the double-volume revised edition of STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL via @torbooks is on super-eBook-sale right now. 684 pages! For only $3.99! Via Kindle, Kobo & Apple Books! Includes THE STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL TALE OF MISS PERCY PARKER and THE DARKLY LUMINOUS FIGHT FOR PERSEPHONE PARKER + extra scenes & content.

This book of my heart is: GOTHIC. It's Jane-Eyre-Meets-Dark-Academia+Hot-For-Teacher+GHOSTS+Greek-Mythology+Jack-the-Ripper+Found-Family

YES, there is a paperback omnibus edition, available via Bookshop.org (my favorite link to send folks to, it supports local bookstores!), B&N and any physical store can order it in. It's on sale too!

Please share? Thank you!

Kindle - Kobo - Apple Books

[redstarjuly]

I was reading discourse on achilles yesterday and I'm still thinking about some people calling him a r*pist and others saying that other books they've read that are from a woman's perspective completely shifted the perception they have of TSOA's Achilles. And to me that makes little to no sense.

Here's what I come from: Achilles is a character from the Illiad, and the poem itself is pretty much fanfiction. I mean, the person and warrior that Achilles is based on probably existed, and it might have been called Achilles even, but i think we all agree that the rest is dubious.

Since the illiad is like the OG story, people tend to look at it as if it's canon and we'll go with that logic. You have the canon work and poets go off on their own versions of these characters writing tragedies, more epics, thesis, all sorts of stuff, and it goes on for centuries until we reach The song of Achilles and Percy Jackson and all the other 100s retellings coming out which are fanfiction of fanfiction.

And you're letting one fanfiction distort another fanfiction? It's bonkers to me because as someone who has to read the classics and grew up on fanfiction, I don't see that happening elsewhere. Between academics, if we're discussing a myth, we mention the different versions, and we can choose one to go on from, sure. But even so, I never saw someone sound so affected by different perspectives on the same character in class.

And if we're talking on the world of street fanfiction, I most definitely don't find people going "Oh this fanfiction of hermione betraying the order and marrying voldmort changed my perspective of Harry Potter's hermione" you know? -- if that sounds like a stupid example, it's because it is. It's just to show that my whole point is that it's insane to me to let a book ruin another book when the authors are creating different versions of the same characters, which basically turns them into different characters with the same names. Especially since you know, it's all made up. And this isn't real criticism to the people forming their opinions or the authors, respect to all of them.

But it’s a little maddening watching people roll into arguments to discuss what piece of fiction is more real and relevant when they're all in the same level of glorified AO3 works.

I hope this makes sense to someone else

[katabay]

bad governance university era!

spartaco & crasso are (initially) on opposite ends of the student activist spectrum (crasso leans towards reformist movements, spartaco is more radical) and they spend a lot of time arguing, but at the end of the day. they’re still making signs and showing up to the same protests. incidents, of course, happen.

you can read a brief chronology on the history of political protest in the Philippines here, especially the sections for the Third Republic and First Quarter Storm, if you want more context on the reformist/radical movements that this era of bad governance is drawing from.

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[miroana]

Things I like about Troy (2004)

- Everyone is so hot. so hot. thank you for your service

- Amazing action choreography and acting — you can recognize the characters from their fighting and movements alone

- Gorgeous set and costume design

- Good acting performances. shoutout to Odysseus for being the best (and shady as hell), Hector for his impeccable honor, and Achilles, Helen, and Paris for being hot as fuck. It deserves a second mention

- Agamemnon sucks and it needed to be said

- That one line about the gods envying mortals because everything is more beautiful when you’re doomed, which everyone attributes to Homer but was actually just Brad Pitt

- Depicts the sacking of Troy as a tragedy and not a triumph which is what Homer would have wanted

Things I don’t like about Troy (2004)

- cousins

- Not accurate to the Iliad in any sense whatsoever

- Like seriously that was off in so many ways I’m not even going to bother to list them. just assume that if it happened in the movie it’s probably not in the Iliad

- All the women had no personality besides being sad. It’s such a shame bc I have it on good authority that Helen is brilliant if a bit vain and Briseis is very kind and brave

- cousins?

- The gods aren’t in it (no hilarious petty squabbling)

- My man Patroclus didn’t get his heroic bloody rampage so effective and violent that Apollo had to put him down

- No Big Ajax and his friend, Little Ajax

- Also, where is Diomedes is he safe is he okay? No, I get it. they didn’t want to overshadow Achilles and Diomedes is a class A badass. but still

- Achilles never physically fights a river in his endless rage (and wins)

- COUSINS???

[olivsie]

Something I like about epic the musical is that it Gives it's changes to the original text an actual Purpose

( The first couple paragraphs are basically a rant regarding retellings. If you only want to hear about epic Skip to paragraph 4)

1. I am a bit annoyed by the lack of. Understanding as to why RETELLINGS aren't the most historicaly accurate things in the world. Sorry to break this to you, but that's both just how they work and I would guess how they reach success. Ancient Greece is a much different culture than our own, And most of us would be terrified to actually live back then. When you are Trying to create content That is based on ancient Greece And you want it to be successful/ At least reach a wide, and notably, MODERN audience. You're likely going to have to take some creative liberty And change a few things. Don't get me wrong, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LIKE RETELLINGS KNOWING THAT FACT ( Me personally, I'm not the biggest fan of Miller's novels Even though I do like epic) BUT IT IS SOMETHING TO BE AWARE OF. And because of that I don't think I would ever expect a retelling to be perfectly accurate And I don't. I had interest in mythology LONG before epic the musical But I didn't actually read the Odyssey until getting into epic. I did not expect it To be just like the musical, I knew Odysseus was going to be much more of an asshole, along with other characters. The odyssey and epic are different pieces of media to me And I am not less of a mythology nerd for liking epic ( Though I will admit that sometimes I take tiny little fun facts of mythology And like to think of them in the context of epic, but that's just for fun.)

2. The Only time being a fan of retellings is wrong as if you genuinely believe they are perfectly accurate And refuse to listen to anything else ( Which has definitely happened, And mythology nerds have the right to be annoyed at that)

3. Some people only like to consume real mythology media, Others like both real mythology and retellings, Others only like to engage with retellings (I would hope they have the self-awareness to know It's not real mythology, From what I've seen some do and some don't, Unfortunately)

4. Ok. now on to what the title of this long ass rant says

I like that epic the musical Retells the story, Not only to both cater to modern audience But Also with its OWN purpose of man versus monster.

Obviously, this is not the point of the original text. Mythos Odysseus does not give a single fuck About the stuff that epic odysseus does. I don't know why the creator Decided to rewrite it this way, (If he's ever said why let me know) But I would assume he wanted to make something about the oddessy And this was simply a very creative way to Translate that for modern audience.

I like this because, yes, holy damn. It does have changes from the original text. But it's not JUST changing it. It's changing it with a purpose

It feels reminiscent of some kind of Dramatic play. the way that epic characterizes.

Polites' kind nature is Representative of the Concept of being merciful Represented in his lines such as " This life is amazing when you greet it with open arms" /"There is so much guilt inside your heart, So why not replace it?"

While in contrast you have eurylochus with more ruthlessness and cautious nature, this is Found in some of his lines such as "You rely on wit, and people die on it" /"we don't know what's ahead" / "I say we strike first. We don't have time to waste so lets raid the place-" /"Let's just cut our losses, You and I and let's run"

And then you have Odysseus, the man/monster. The first act of this Musical is his internal struggle With what He should be On that scale. And the other characters Represent this struggle in the song monster

" Is the cyclops struck with gilt when he kills, is he up in the middle of the night? Or does he end my men to avenge his friend and then Sleep knowing he has done him right?

When the witch turns men to pigs to protect her nymphs, is she going insane? Or did she learn to be colder when she got older and now she saves them the pain?

When a God comes down and makes a Fleet drown Is he scared that he's doing something wrong? Or does he keep us in check So we must respect him and now no one dares to piss him off"

He then Applies this to himself

" Does a soldier use a wooden horse to kill sleeping trojans cause he is vile? Or does he throw away his remorse and save more lives with guile?"

And this marks his turning point of deciding that Ruthlessness It's ultimately worth it if it means Getting home, as aeolus says "The end Always justifies the means"

It's in my opinion, a very creative way to go about retelling a myth. Is it accurate? Absolutely not. For example, circe (From what we know) is not protecting When she turns men into pigs, For all we know, she could just do it because Shits and giggles.

Her character and most others in epic is changed from the original. But it's not ONLY changing for the sake of apeling to the modern Western audience and being successful like Many other retellings. It is also and mainly changing for the sake of influencing the plot that Jorge Rivera herrans crafted For the sake of Retelling epic. It is creative and I enjoy it despite knowing it's not accurate.

[moomoocowmaid]

I'm watching Drunk History, right after watching the new Percy Jackson episode…

Can we get a full Drunk History Greek mythology season?!?

[pink-inthenights-blog]

Sick basic books that are inspired by Greek mythology, I wanna see REAL shit going on. Go offer a heifer with no blemishes, do a bacchanal with your friends in the middle of the woods (try not to kill a local farmer), go ape shit cause your bro died instead of you, and take on the name of your girl bff after she dies (ahem Pallas Athena), then learn how to use a bow and maybe get a lover named Hyacinth.

[wordsmithic]

I had it up to here. This is a review of the Iliad (!) and this person (White Anglophone, their country, US, controls Greece to a large degree) says Madeline Miller's work is better than a national epic??

And they evaluate - nay, reduce - the content of an epic my people have been making and preserving for centuries as "competition among men, petty gods, and long list of male family trees with some poetic snippets."

Excuse us stupid Greeks for respecting and recording family lines and tracing our lineage from the gods since time immemorial, I guess. Why don't you piss on our cultural figures and gods while you're at it, too? (Oh, wait, you did)

And you didn't even read the poetry of the original, which is honestly stunning at its phrasing, so, your loss. I guess your mind (and edition you read?) only caught "some" poetic snippets.

Typical behaviour of many Madeline Miller fans, unfortunately.

Honestly, honey, avoid the Odyssey and any other cultural epic. They don't deserve your eyes looking at their pages made by generations of my ancestors. And get outta here with your "I hate the all-male stuff" attitude. You have no idea of the huge contribution of our women of all ages to our literature and folklore.

I get if reading Epics isn't for you and if you don't enjoy them. But don't make it a problem of the Epics and people's cultural heritage. Placing "hot boy romance" and "(western) female rage" WASP feminism fantasies over ancient Epics is totally a you problem.

I feel like I'm going hard on that person but no, actually. They disrespected part of the Greek culture sooo much that I don't care, especially knowing more and more people are gonna have this attitude in the future. While shouting "I'm against colonialism and imperialism!" at that. (σε πιστεύουμε γλυκιά μου μη χτυπιέσαι)

But worry not! For the low price of $19.99 you too can have the colonialist attitude of a 19th century dandy!

[brother-emperors]

@garland-on-thy-brow's tags on this post: #pompey texting crassus. #heyyyyyyy hello so how about another consulship together-

I have AUs like it's options at a vending machine, so I'm borrowing this as an excuse to post one of my modern AU designs here, but I also like drawing the same situations over and over again so!!

(the ATG in Crassus' contacts stands for Alexander the Great)

[alpaca-clouds]

Greek Mythology and the Thing often overlooked

I have recently been thinking a lot about mythology adaptions in media, especially with the new season of Blood of Zeus being out, me finding out some interesting things, and also me reading into Greek history.

Within Western Circles it is pretty universally accepted, that everyone can use Greek Mythology as a free for all, because it is white, European culture, and we were the ones doing the colonialism and stuff. So while a white person using Japanese mythology for example can be quite iffy, it is totally fine if anyone uses Greek mythology. Because it is like part of the western canon.

Buuuuuuuut... It is kinda a lot more complicated than that, right?

The issue is, of course, that Greece is part of Europe, yes, but the Greek myths are not that widely known because Greece went around at some point pushing their gods on everyone, who would listen (like Christians do), but rather, because the Romans took those gods and myth, while they colonized Greece, and then popularized the stuff. And more than that, because later on the British Empire found those stories and was like: "Oh, this is a neat thing to build our idea of white superiority on. Hey, hey, Greece, nobody said that you are white, did we?"

Because, let's face it. In most of Europe for most of the time the Meditterrean people were not considered to be white. Including the Greece. And I mean, I kinda knew that, but I never really thought about this until recently.

The moment I actually thought about this was actually, when I was looking through the VA profiles of Castlevania, found out that Theo James was actually Greek, and went like: "Oh, that is actually really neat." And then I was like: "Why though?" And then I went: "Ooooooh."

Same happened when I realized that Blood of Zeus is actually written by Greek writers. (Mind you, I still am not a huge fan of the series, but still, I think this fact is neat.)

It is in general something I am realizing more and more. How our discourse about colonialism often lacks a lot of nuance in those regards. And because of that the discourse about stuff like cultural appropriation does, too.

Especially as cultural appropriation is already such a big, complicated issue, that is far from Black and White.

Still, considering the history, I do not think that it is fair to look at Greece in the same way we do look at the actually colonial empires like Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany for the most part. Because their history is quite a different one and a lot more complicated.

[incorrectly-quoted-queers]

I guess I wrote a whole book?

If you'd like a crossover of Crimson Peak, Cinderella, Twilight, and Dracula (that's also gay and says fuck you to the patriarchy) you might like my horror fantasy book, Daughter of Or!

Pre-orders are up now, but the ebook and paperback both officially release on May 26th (the same date as Dracula).

[peonycats]

did i just see someone hc South Korea to be the child of North Korea and America post-WWII

[greekmythcomix]

Hey my dudes*, if you like my stuff I have a shop on Redbubble with a 30% off sale on right now, and all my Iliad and Roman chickens are on as stickers!

Selking my wares is how I keep my educational website free of ads 😁

If you buy anything, you have my eternal gratitude!

https://www.redbubble.com/people/GreekMythComix/shop?asc=u

*am child of the 90s 🤘