#revisionist mythology

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Not me getting back on my Greek Mythology bullshit, but I feel like a lot of adaptations of Herakles gloss over the part of his story where Hera literally mind-controls him into killing his family.

Like, Imagine having your agency, you mind, and your reason stripped from you so completely and utterly by a force you can't fight against or comprehend and that force makes you murder the people you love most in the world. Why aren't writers doing more with that! The horror of Herakles!

How he can't lift his fists or his sword or his club without seeing his families blood and brain stained across them! how he can't look in the mirror without seeing his children's faces staring back at him? How do you come back from that? From being a puppet, the weapon that murders your own family? Can a weapon grieve? Does it have the right to?

Hell, the only reason Herakles doesn't kill himself is because Theseus shoulders some of the weight of the crime by taking his hand. (Probably the most heroic thing Theseus ever does).

The Twelve Labors aren't a quest for glory, they're about a guy going on a suicide run by facing the most insane challenges the world can throw at him, but every time he triumphs he realizes that he doesn't GET to die. He has to keep going. He has to keep living. He has to live with himself.

And then, one day, when he completes another task, and he sees the grateful faces of the people he's saved, the lives he's made a little better, he realizes that he doesn't want to anymore.

[punkfistfights]

somebody come talk to me abt my greek mythology rewrites i'm desperate lmao

[peasantexchangeprogram]

no yeah it must really suck for you how nazis "reappropriated" mythos and history that would not have been remotely as mainstream as they are today without white supremacist revival. where the modern perspective and perception of them the very "aesthetic" of them is inextricably tied to white supremacist eugenist ideals im so sorry you cant wear relatively historically uncommon symbols in public without people thinking you believe that they, their family, community, and the mere idea of their existence should be wiped from the face of the earth. that must be so hard for you.

[mystery-moose]

Okay no for real this whole idea of Goncharov is very funny but get your fuckin’ timeline right, okay.

Martin Scorsese had made exactly two movies by 1973, he didn’t have the cachet to make a big budget or even mid budget crime movie about the Naples mafia. Certainly not the greatest mafia movie ever made! Further, he hadn’t yet developed his filmmaking style, let alone his fascination with the criminal underworld, and The Godfather had just come out the year before, so there wasn’t even time to get used to the romantic portrayal of gangsters that Scorsese’s films would act as revisionist responses to! The conversation had barely even started yet!

And then there’s the actors: Robert De Niro was a working actor then, not a huge star — he’d been in a few movies by then, including three from noted trash sommelier Brian De Palma and one from even more noted trash auteur Roger Corman — and he actually worked with Scorsese and Keitel that same year in Mean Streets! He got some acclaim for that performance but it wasn’t like, Godfather level, y’know? Not in terms of fame or notice at least. And Pacino? Pacino’s first major role was The Godfather the previous year! That was his third film ever! He did Serpico in ‘73! He hadn’t even done Dog Day Afternoon yet! And he didn’t work with Scorsese until The Irishman, which came out in 2019!

Really, y’all, what you’re imagining, the movie you’re all spinning out of thin air here, probably came out in like, 1983, not ‘73. Probably in place of Scarface or something (which for my money would be an improvement). You’ve got De Niro post-Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver, he’s worked with Scorsese before, you’ve had two excellent Godfather films to build a mythology of the romantic gangster around for Scorsese to play with. You’ve got Pacino after shit like Serpico and Cruising, he’s in his prime. You’re still pre-Goodfellas for Scorsese, so he hasn’t gone sicko mode yet, but he’s done great movies that got noticed and he’d be able to pick up a budget and a production company to go to Naples. He’s worked with big studios, he’s got some clout. Now is the time for Goncharov!

But nooo, all this happened before you were born so it’s all vague and nebulous “before-times.” What’s the difference between 1973 and 1983? Who cares? Well I do! And now you know! History matters okay!! Learn ya history!!!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

Why Nikki Haley’s answer omitting slavery as a cause of the Civil War matters.

What happened.

At a campaign event in New Hampshire, a member of the audience asked Nikki Haley to identify the causes of the Civil War. She gave an evasive answer that omitted slavery as a cause of the Civil War. She said,

I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.

Haley was immediately attacked, mocked, and condemned for failing to identify slavery as a cause of the Civil War. During a Thursday morning interview, she attempted to walk back her prior answer with an equally offensive and unconvincing answer. As described in Forbes,

During the Thursday morning interview, she said the goal of the Civil War was to ensure each person has their freedom, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the “freedom to do and be anything they want to be without anyone or government getting in the way . . . Yes, I know it was about slavery. I’m from the South, of course I know it’s about slavery.”

Why it matters.

Haley has a history of minimizing or dismissing the role of slavery in the Civil War. The incident on Wednesday is merely the latest episode that reveals her willingness to cater to white nationalists in pursuit of elected office. As former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said,

She's smart and she knows better. And she didn't say it because she's a racist. Because she's not. I know her well and I don't believe Nikki has a racist bone in her body . . . the reason she did it is just as bad, if not worse, and should make everybody concerned about her candidacy. She did it because she's unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth. If she is unwilling to stand up and say that slavery is what caused the Civil War because she's afraid of offending constituents in some other part of the country, if she's afraid to say that Donald Trump is unfit because she's afraid of offending people who support Donald Trump, . . . What's going to happen when she has to stand up against forces in our own party who want to drag this country deeper and deeper into anger and division and exhaustion?”

Christie is right that Nikki Haley is afraid to tell the truth. But she is also a reactionary conservative posing as a moderate. As the NYTimes noted, her failure to include slavery threatens to destroy her image as someone attractive to moderate Republicans and independents. Per the Times,

Ms. Haley’s appeal as a candidate of moderation is mixed. As governor of South Carolina, she signed some of the harshest immigration and anti-abortion laws in the country at the time, as well as a stringent voter identification law that required photo ID at the ballot box.

But Haley’s omission of slavery was not merely an act of cowardice on her part. She was promoting a dangerous revisionist history of the Civil War that has taken root in the former Confederate states. Haley is promoting the myth of the “Lost Cause” of the South—a romanticized transformation of the brutal practice of slavery into (in the words of Haley) “traditions that are noble — traditions of history, of heritage, and of ancestry.”

I highly recommend a thoughtful and detailed discussion of Haley’s dangerous answer by Joshua Zeitz in Politico, Opinion | Why Was It So Hard for Nikki Haley to Say "Slavery"? Civil War History Has the Answer.

Zeitz writes,

The Lost Cause mythology was more than bad history. It provided the intellectual justification for Jim Crow — not just in the former Confederacy, but everywhere systemic racism denied Black citizens equal citizenship and economic rights. [¶] With GOP presidential candidates waffling on the Civil War, rejecting history curricula in their states and launching political fusillades against “woke” culture, it remains for the rest of us to reaffirm the wisdom of Frederick Douglass, who in the last years of his life stated: “Death has no power to change moral qualities. What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. … Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”

Nikki Haley wants to forget “the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.” In pursuit of the presidency, she recasts “fighting for slavery” as “noble traditions of history, heritage, and ancestry.” Shame on her.

Haley is telling us who she is. We should believe her.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[rachel-morrigan]

Rising from the depths of my cave to say i have become a script revisionist and story advisor for an indie produced movie, if everything goes well at one point i can openly go "hooooly shit look!!" Tho my hands are tied now.

Looks fun tho, hopefully i can manage to say sth more at one point, if you see me archive this post or delete it its cause im very nervous about work things generally lmao.

The story is very much based on dante's inferno and mythology which is fun, hopefully it gets fully made so i can point and go " my name!!!" When credits come up

Anywho goodnight mwah mwah

[truthdogg]

This article is from 2018, but it’s extremely relevant today, because of how influential David Barton has been over the past five years since it was written. The change in tone from the right has shifted in that time as more and more of Barton’s followers have taken office and implemented his ideas.

One of the key elements of his phony mythology, for starters, is that the founders were divinely inspired evangelicals, and that they cannot be criticized whatsoever. From the article:

“It's also telling that so much of this revisionist American history is about blending Christianity with a very specific form of American (usually white) nationalism. Figures like Barton blend the idea that America is a "Christian country" with the idea that the only critiques of the Founding Fathers - that, say, they owned slaves or contributed to racial inequality - come from "politically correct" historians seeking to discredit America's great history for political ends.

“The founders double as hero-saints to Barton. Central to the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation is the idea that America was founded unproblematically; that only a return to this mythologized past will somehow solve perceived problems of structural inequality. "Real" America, in other words, is above criticism.”

This is the entire basis of DeSantis and others’ “anti-woke” and “anti-CRT” philosophy.

Further, watch out for any elected official claiming the US Constitution is divinely inspired. Whenever you hear it, you’re hearing a Barton-following Dominionist who should not hold political office.

And here the article explains just why so many Republicans are no longer hiding their complete & utter disdain for democracy itself:

“…Barton is among those who believe the ultimate goal for American government should be a Christian theocratic state, which is necessary to properly usher in the apocalyptic End Times. Dominionism takes many forms, …(n)evertheless, its fundamental principle is the same: Christians must work toward a theocratic state in which Christians are in control. Or, as current congressional candidate (and fellow Barton enthusiast) Rick Saccone said in an interview last year with Pastors Network of America, God wants Christians “who will rule with the fear of God in them, to rule over us.” ”

If you don’t recall, Saccone fortunately lost that election as well as the one after. (Thank you, Pennsylvania!) But others like him continue to win. Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz are notable Dominionists, and even Donald Trump has publicly embraced these ideas. This worldview they share isn’t undermining their support; it’s why they have any. Republicans’ strongest supporters are with them because of these views, while so-called moderates like Mitt Romney, Adam Kinziger & others continue to lose party support. This is exactly why influential pastors like Robert Jeffress and David Jeremiah are such avid Trump campaigners, because they believe in Christian authoritarianism and believe that Trump can (and will) make it happen.

We need to be very clear about this. Today’s Republicans are mostly Barton-inspired fanatics at all levels, especially locally. This is why after Tennessee Republicans ejected Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, they were caught on tape claiming that they were personally at the forefront of a “war” for control of the nation.

Base Republicans believe this nonsense. That’s why the very next thing the Tennessee legislature did after that recording was made was vote to allow unlicensed concealed carry, because they want their soldiers armed if and when they are voted out of office. If you look at the collateral damage of their war—our now-daily mass murders—it’s easy to see what impact their belief is having. The fear and distrust these killings create serve their goals as well, as those are critical ingredients for any authoritarian regime.

If we don’t start paying attention to this poisonous religious & racist rhetoric, we will not be able to stop not only our daily violence, but the coming violence as well. January 6th is going to look like the tourist visit Republicans claim it was. This is urgent. The change in right-wing rhetoric from this 2018 article to today’s full-throated endorsement and implementation of its ideas should make that very clear.

[edwardseymour]

(from other blog!)

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

shan't be posting a screenshot, but the take that ‘defending katherine parr is defending thomas seymour’ is actually repugnant. her actions wrt elizabeth can and should be criticised — but within their proper context. katherine was a brilliant woman but she was also a woman, and legally, socially and culturally her husband overpowered her. she lived in a patriarchal society. she was negligent, at best, complicit, at worst — but she did warn ashley to keep an eye on thomas and elizabeth, did berate her husband for his ill-treatment, and did ultimately send elizabeth away. she was also pregnant with his child and the pregnancy seems to have been difficult. and elizabeth loved her; she was more her mother than anyone else. putting her on the same level as thomas seymour is just so gross to me.

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

i PROMISE you anne boleyn does not receive the ‘worst’ historical abuse of the six wives/female historical figures. the idea of an evil, manipulative, promiscuous anne boleyn is nowhere near as culturally prevalent and pervasive as you insist it is. she very much does not have it anywhere near as bad as is claimed.

people simply do not care about anne boleyn, far more than they actively hate her — and where she does get treated with misogyny, it’s on a similar level to other female historical figures. it’s not distinct to her. moreover, what is unique to her is the level of revisionism and attention she gets. as another post has already put it: “anne's reinvention has been the most powerful and vocal in historical circles. anne is the center of almost all revisionist efforts in tudor historiography”. none of the six wives have been researched, revisited, reimagined and rehabilitated or simply discussed even a fraction as much.

we've already been over this. at this point i honestly believe insistence over this simply comes down to people looking for a thing to feel persecuted and exceptional over, while lacking the academic curiosity, talent and integrity to actually go and find something more tangible than the single most popular person in tudor history.

10. worst part of fanon

the hypocrisy/doublethink is truly something in this fandom sometimes. ‘monarchy was sacrosanct’ so therefore the commons unfailingly accepted the divine right of kings, except for all the times when they didn't and all the numerous recorded instances of royals being slandered/revolted against... but simultaneously, recognising the use of myth/prophecy and mysticism/faith in discourses of the time is ‘lionising’ historical figures, so we can't talk about henry vii and allusions to y daroganwr or king arthur but we can compare anne boleyn to classical mythology. sure!

13. worst blorboficiation

i recently saw that michael hick’s ‘the self-made king’ book about richard iii (which i haven’t read, so for all i know is very good but the title has always put me off) in a bookshop, and it reminded me how profoundly intellectually dishonest ricardians are. whether or not hicks’ book is sound, the popular/fandom approach to idealising richard iii is legitimately insane. truly i believe the only reason for mutilating the historical richard like this — to turn him into some fantasy merrie olde englande caricature of a medieval king — is to appropriate him into a racist, xenophobic, classist conservative ideal of monarchy. for as much as they might talk of him being ‘self-made’ or ‘socialist’ (as professional-at-failing-upwards matt lewis described him), they clearly do not care for such ideas, because they are centering them around (a fundamentally flawed understanding of) medieval monarchy. it's so ugly.

14. that one thing you see in fics all the time

i don’t read fanfic, but i see posts abt them and edit aus a lot and a consistent thing that i just cannot understand is the ‘fix-it’ narratives that have the women having numerous pregnancies. why? especially because the dates given essentially prove that in these aus, women never get to spend any time not pregnant or getting impregnated — including the historic protocols of lying in, churching etc., or religious conventions (sex was forbidden on certain days etc). it all basically creates an image of a husband who disrespects his wife by constantly trying to impregnate her, and a woman forced to endure the physical demands of constant pregnancy/labour with no regard for any other facet of her life/personhood. especially since these aus give these women a diabolical amount of children (including forcing twins/triplets on these women). it’s just so blatant that queenship/womanhood = being a broodmare. and, worse, these aus have the nerve to give these children horrific names.

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

not directly what was asked but it’s genuinely exhausting how predominantly complaints about katherine howard being called a stupid slut have become wrapped up in this idea that katherine can only be worthy of sympathy if she did not willingly have sex. so often people trying to defend her, and criticising misogyny directed at her, ultimately constrain her to a fundamentally sexist idea — that sex can only be something done to her, as an unwilling participant. otherwise the implication is that comments about her intelligence or promiscuity are justified. there is no benefit to whitewashing katherine’s sexuality, and the insistence on characterising her almost exclusively as a victim is distressing. and it’s tiring having to repeatedly point this out. it simply feels like katherine howard is talked a lot but rarely as a fully actualised person in her own right.

[communistkenobi]

Political knowledge and interest in public affairs are critical preconditions for more active forms of involvement. If you don't know the rules of the game and the players and don't care about the outcome, you're unlikely to try playing yourself. Encouragingly, Americans in the aggregate at century's end are about as likely to know, for example, which party controls the House of Representatives or who their senators are as were their grandparents a half century ago. On the other hand, we are much better educated than our grandparents, and since civics knowledge is boosted by formal education, it is surprising that civics knowledge has not improved accordingly. The average college graduate today knows little more about public affairs than did the average high school graduate in the 1940s. (Bowling Alone, p 35)

Putnam just got done saying voting is only a limited slice of American political participation and voter turnout numbers can’t be used to generalise about all public political engagement, but we are now back to “knowing about elected officials” as a generalised version of political knowledge (which, as he argues, is a pre-condition to political participation, eg voting).

Adorno’s comment about the widespread political ignorance of the American public comes to mind while reading this, although his diagnosis is very different from Putnam’s, pointing instead to the industrial capitalist standardisation of education that produces extremely rigid knowledge frameworks that encourage people to think in set types, to believe there are singularly correct answers to complex problems, and that these answers are discoverable only within the available range of options (contributing to “both-sides”-isms and a failure to imagine political discourse beyond what is presented by political candidates). I think there’s a bunch of idealism going on there too, but Adorno at least acknowledges that education in America is the result of capitalist economic production shaping cultural and educational standards, which are deeply revisionist and use american imperial interests as the basis for educational programs. Coupled with how poorly funded and decentralised public education is, the privatised nature of post-secondary education, and the deeply racialised and gendered dimensions of economic inequality, access to the types of education that would inform you about political matters is reserved for the select few.

And that’s still a very generous criticism, given that Putnam’s argument rests on the absurd notion that political participation is a function of education (even though he acknowledges in that last sentence that college degrees don’t necessarily mean you “know the rules of the game.”) Again I’m not like a historical expert or anything, but my understanding is that black civil rights movements, gay civil rights movements, women’s rights movements etc in the 60s and onwards were not resultant from all those people individually getting college degrees or learning who their elected officials were but rather mass organising and protesting - ie, a response to the failures of electoral politics to secure civil rights and protections for oppressed groups. This is again a bourgeois conception of political participation - if education is a necessary function of political engagement, then mass movements and demonstrations do not really “count” as political engagement.

it’s honestly laughable that this book is as well-regarded and heavily cited as it is. Putnam is fundamentally unserious about and uninterested in anything outside of the American mythological conception of bourgeois individualism and electoral politics. The term “social capital,” a centrally important concept in his book, is not interrogated for any ideological baggage or methodological limitations it may carry, and he has not provided any explanation for social change aside from the completely ridiculous idea that generational change is the driving factor in American politics. He claims that a lack of knowledge or interests in electoral outcomes prevents people from “playing the game,” with no allowance for anyone who declares the game itself is unfair, or any argument that we should change the rules of the game. He’s writing about the social life in America with the assumption that there is literally nothing beyond liberal electoral individualism, and any arguments to the contrary - any political activity that is illegal, unpopular to the white public, or simply uninterested in electoralism - to be unimportant in diagnosing the social ills of American society. What a fucking joke

[azspot]

But as Haley must know — after all, as governor of South Carolina, she presided over the removal of Confederate flags from the Statehouse — many Americans do question the fundamental fact that slavery precipitated the Civil War, and her equivocation played into a long-standing agenda to rewrite American history. Haley was effectively parroting the Lost Cause mythology, a revisionist school of thought born in the war’s immediate aftermath, which whitewashed the Confederacy’s cornerstone interest in raising arms to preserve slavery. Instead, a generation of Lost Cause mythologists chalked the war up to a battle over political abstractions like states’ rights.

Why Was It So Hard for Nikki Haley to Say "Slavery"? Civil War History Has the Answer

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Baldur and Hela

So i’ve been thinking a lot about Norse mythology because I have literally nothing better to do, and I thought of a re-imagining of Baldur’s death so here we go I guess.

-

So Baldur dies, right. Very sad. God of peace, compassion, love, probably puppies, and he’s dead. Very sad. What’s worse, because he didn’t die in battle, he goes to Helheim, the icy and cold land, where the unglorious dead go.

And there, he meets Hela, the grim Goddess. Half a corpse, a dead heart in her chest. She rules this icy land where there is no hope, no light, and no love.

Except, now there is.

Now, this glorious shinning light of compassion and love has descended down into these icy depths, and brought with it the first ray of sunlight Helheim has ever seen. A kind, and good soul, a God of Love.

Hela cannot stand. She loathes the sight of the the thing, hates the tight feeling in her chest when she sees him. The unnatural throbbing in her dead heart as she looks upon something that doesn’t belong in this hopeless land.

Hela rages at Asgard. Demands that they take this damnable light away. Demands that they leave her alone in her cold, familiar apathy. She’s not like her brother, not like Fenrir, who craved love and companionship. She is a dead thing. A thing that cannot be loved, and loves nothing.

So the Gods make preparations, struggle to find a way, and Hela is alone. Alone with her complete opposite. Hela is dread, hateful and cold. Baldur is light, kid and considerate.

But time passes, as she waits, she engages with him. They talk. She comes to know him. And she grows to ha(love)te him even more. He is not repulsed by her dead flesh. He smiles, and she feels the sun on her skin. Her good eye waters with tears. He gives her space when she desires it. He comes close when she needs it.

Hela hates it. She hates how he comforts the souls of her domain. She hates how he makes her smile. Hates how he makes the world seem just a little bit brighter.

She hates that she is coming to dread the day he will leave.

She hates the unnatural beating of her dead heart.

She hates that the Gods were so cruel as to taunt her with this. So cruel as to send something she was never meant to have to her realm. Is she not Hela? The grim Goddess? Destined to forever rule her icy realm of pain and misery alone?

The day comes, and all thing weep for Baldur. Even Loki, the architect of his death, weeps as well, deciding that the joke has gone far enough, weeps for Baldur. Even Hela weeps, from her one good eye. She weeps that he must leave her. That he must darken her realm with his absence.

And yet, he remains.

Go! She screams at him. Go, and leave me! You were never for this place. You were never for me!

And still Baldur does not go.

Why, why, why does he taunt her so!? Why does he stay when all thing weep for him to return?

Baldur reaches forward, ad wipes the tears from Hela’s face. And speaks in a voice that is as the birdsong in the trees.

I came here, and I saw a woman who took up a duty no one else would shoulder. I came here, and saw a woman stronger than even Thor and Tyr, willing to endure an eternity of loneliness, if only it meant giving shelter to the unwanted dead. And I saw a woman of insurpassable beauty, unlike any creature above or below.

How could I not fall in love with such a creature?

In the end, Baldur did not stay in Helheim through any machination of Odin, or trick of Loki. In the end, much stronger shackles bound him than any other band of iron and steel.

In the end, Baldur stayed through his own choice. In the end, he stayed in Helheim, bringing light and joy to the souls there, for a very simple reason.

In the end, he stayed with the woman he loved, who’s heart finally found a reason to beat.

[its-your-mind]

sazed, busy holding two shards, preserving the free will of an entire planet, guiding the lives of specific individuals, and fending off an attack from an evil force trying to take over the cosmere: hey, I’m starting to get real worried about this Problem that seems to be happening, do you have any thoughts-

kel, forming several (more) cult followings, writing revisionist history and mythology of his own life, and sending a group of trained assassins and spies around to other systems to fuck around and find out: huh?

saze: …

[herawell]

About me: Alia, she/her, 24, Desi-American. (I used to go by Ally on here, and my url was @allegoriesinmediasres for many years.)

I'm very busy with work and school -- DM or tag me in anything you don't want me to miss!

About this blog: Multifandom/personal/writing. Inbox and askbox always open. Requests sometimes open (currently closed) but the muse is always fickle. I tag triggers as [trigger] cw.

Fandoms: Tudor era, Tolkien (especially Thranduil), Hindu mythology, Wolf 359

My AO3: AllegoriesInMediasRes

My fics on Tumblr: #myfics

My edits on Tumblr: #myedits

Where else to find me:

Dreamwidth: allegoriesinmediasres

FFN: allegoriesinmediasres

Reddit: u/allyinmediasres

Discord: allegoriesinmediasres#7481 or allegoriesinmediasres

Email: allegoriesinmediasres@gmail.com

Other tags: #shooketh #lovely dark and deep #web weaving #hands #bioluminescence #revisionist fairy tales #brothers who loved their sisters to the ends of their lives

I also write extensively for ot3: political power trio, a sprawling Tudors AU OT3 verse originally created by @mihrsuri (more info about the verse in the pinned post on her blog).

Tumblr link cleaner

[catboyattorney]

just got an ad for another "queer revisionist greek mythology" novel. when will it fucking end

[princesssarisa]

Character ask: Aphrodite

Favorite thing about them: She's a fascinating figure, full of potential for stories: a stunningly, irresistibly beautiful goddess who embodies romantic love and sexuality, who can be cruel and kind in equal measure, just like love itself. It's no wonder that she's captivated writers and artists for centuries.

Least favorite thing about them: As I said above, she can be cruel: for example, in her treatment of Psyche, and her role in starting the Trojan War. Of course this is true for most of the Greek gods and goddesses, not just her.

Three things I have in common with them:

*I'm passionate.

*I love romance (in stories, at least) and visual beauty.

*I can be hot-tempered and petty sometimes.

Three things I don't have in common with them:

*I'm not irresistibly alluring to men.

*I don't take vicious offense when people consider other women more beautiful than I am.

*Unlike her traditional depiction, I'm not blonde.

Favorite line: I'd need to read through all the various mythology sources to find one.

brOTP: Her son Eros, when she's not abusing his future wife Psyche.

OTP: Her various famous lovers (Ares, Anchises, Adonis), and in some modern retellings, her husband Hephaestus.

nOTP: Any of her own children, or anyone she's put a curse on.

Random headcanon: If there's a place where the gods and goddesses of different cultures can meet, then when she visits that place, I'm sure she enjoys lording her fame over other love-goddesses like Inanna and Freya. None of them embody love and beauty throughout Western art and popular culture the way she does.

Unpopular opinion: I'm not sure how to feel about the traditional portrayal of her marriage to Hephaestus, or about revisionist versions thereof. On the one hand, I understand the urge to deconstruct the tradition of "beautiful goddess despises her ugly husband and has affairs willy-nilly with handsomer gods and men." By pure instinct, I like seeing them reimagined as a happily married couple. But at the same time, I think of all the discourse surrounding the Hades and Persephone myth, and apply the same thoughts here. Arguably, the fact that Aphrodite is forced into a loveless marriage reflects the experience of most women in ancient Greece, and the fact that she does have affairs willy-nilly – and that she's the goddess of love but not of marriage – reflects the separation between marriage and love in ancient Greek culture. Ultimately, I'm open to both types of retelling, just like I'm open both to "happily married Persephone" and "unhappily married Persephone" in portrayals of the Underworld.

Song I associate with them: None.

Favorite picture of them:

The Aphrodite of Knidos:

The Aphrodite of Milos, or as it's better known in pop culture, the Venus de Milo:

Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus:

Alexandre Cabanel's The Birth of Venus:

The Sleeping Venus by Giorgione and Titian:

Titian's Venus of Urbino, assuming she really is the goddess and not just a courtesan:

Titian's Venus with a Mirror:

Jacques-Louis David's Mars Being Disarmed by Venus:

William Blake Richmond's Venus and Anchises:

This illustration of her birth from D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths:

Marilee Heyer's illustration of her birth from Doris Orgel's book We Goddesses:

Aphrodite as she appears in Disney's Hercules – not high art, but she is cute:

[nokingsonlyfooles]

Brigitte Empire! She's just done a big move to escape TERF Island, and YT (and associated donations) are her only source of income right now. Listen, like, and reply to her video (you don't have to read the YT comments - though most aren't too bad - just say "hi") to help her out with the algorithm, and give money if you can.

And, while I have your attention, how DOES one differentiate between a nice, civil protest and a lawbreaking riot?

Well, is "one" an ordinary human being without a badge - press or police/security?

Like these BLM folks right here?

...Then your input is not required. Sorry. You don't actually get to define whether you're here to be heard or to break shit and ruin it for everyone. You have no authority over your message, and we do not believe you when you express your intent, especially if there's any (I mean ANY) property damage. Human lives are more important than some light vandalism and broken windows, you say? Well, lalalalala, 'cos we're not listening.

But if "one" does have a badge...

Aha! Behold, a miscreant!

Yes. Take that, you... you building-haters!

...one is allowed, nay, expected to put the proper framework around this chaos of, uh, human beings asking for human rights with their (theoretically) protected right to protest.

And this framework is subject to change!

...like, a lot of change. Within a single human lifetime, MLK goes from commie threat to conservative icon, and the protests he helped organize go from "tut-tut, so uncivil" to a triumph of nonviolent resistance. Gandhi and his tactics have gone through a similar rehabilitation/reclaimation.

And Stonewall? It's gone from a riot to a protest to a riot, with an ever-evolving cast of heroes, villains, and participants. Brigitte up there steered clear of who was involved and what their motivations may have been, and I suppose I will too, because we're all very attached to our own personal mythology. We all want to have been there, and there's some backlash and othering for people with queer identities that aren't part of the mythos.

I will say, though, that the man-o-sphere-centric film Buck Breaking sure did cough up an interesting interpretation for us. (Don't bother to watch it, I didn't, I just read/listened about it. It seems painful.) To the brain trust behind this propaganda piece, Stonewall was a BLACK riot - with no queer folks involved at all, certainly not any Black queer folks - and we STOLE it from them. I'm not gonna take that apart either, F. D. Signifier already did, and his experiences give him a better viewpoint than mine.

A riot is defined, and fueled by the police reaction in the moment, and afterwards, the media and politicians will carve it up however they see fit. Generally speaking, contemporary sources tend to err on the side of the police, and slowly get more revisionist as time passes. If the cops don't want you where you are, they will come up with a reason to remove you, provoking one if necessary. (See, my earlier post today, responding to efforts to make it more difficult to protest in the States.)

Cops are trained to parse any disturbance (even a bunch of kids singing patriotic music at the Capitol to score cheap points for the Republican House Speaker) as a threat, and they will minimize or remove it. A protest that does not cause a disturbance is not an effective protest. Thus, ANYTHING can be a riot. And, once the cops fire a few chemical weapons into the crowd, it sure will look like one. That's nice for any newspaper photographers who happen to be in the area!

This is why, when I talk about violent protests, I say the violence happens, like a rainy day or a sneeze. Speaking as a bleeding-heart lefty progressive (I don't show up for shit like January 6th), most people aren't looking to hurt anyone, they just want to be heard. If you do look like you're just there to start some shit, or you bring a weapon, someone will take you aside and ask you to go home, or at least leave that shit in the car. People with obvious weapons make a suitable excuse for the police to start some shit of their own - and we'd all rather not be pepper-sprayed or gassed, thanks. But if the cops want you gone, they are able to turn up the pressure until someone snaps, and then they'll start doing damage and making arrests anyway.

The first Pride was a riot, and a protest, and the participants repaid police violence against them with violence against the police. Police do their violence on behalf of the State, so we tend to overlook it, or spread the responsibility around until everyone is a little bit complicit. (We live in a democracy, right? Right?) But the truth is, a riot can be self-defense. It just doesn't look like it in the papers, because systemic oppression doesn't photograph very well.

Nothing about what's happening is "civil." "Civility" is not what anyone is after, here. What they want is silence. Silence just lets them keep doing whatever the hell they were doing, while pretending we're all OK with it. If you raise your voice, they will do whatever they can to shut you down. They lie, they cheat, they wound, and they kill.

Well, you can't make any noise if you're dead. So first, stay alive. And then, if you can, yell your fucking head off. Don't quiet down no matter what label they hit you with. If you're lucky, one day you'll be a triumph of nonviolent resistance too!