“Nico had once read a story from Plato, who claimed that in ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, and four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half —man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their lives searching for their other halves. And where does that leave me? Nico wondered. It wasn’t his favorite story.”
If you’ve read Tribulations then you know why I’m offended at this! He took the myth and turned it against Nico!
alsoI’mconvincedhe’sbeenreadingmyfanfiction
What the… but that isn’t… AGH!
Okay kids, it’s time for me to rant give you a lesson on Plato!
This myth was created by Plato for his dialogue The Symposium, which talks about love, its nature and the diferent forms it can take (thanks to this dialogue, we have the term “Platonic Love”). This particular myth is the most famous part of the play, and greeks being so, so bisexual, would never approve of such a heteronormative retelling.
The original tale didn’t have such crap as “all humans had been a combination of male and female”. In the myth there were actually three genders all with two sets of genitalia. Males (with two male genitalia), born from the Sun, females (two female genitalia), born from the Earth, and androgynous (one of each), born from the Moon. Plato describes their division by Zeus and desire to be one again like this:
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.
Let’s ignore for now how heterosexuals are supposedly mostly unfaithful among other unfortunate implications (some say part of it is satire on origin myths themselves, so there’s that), and let’s go back to the BoO quote and how it angers me.
The point of the story isn’t how “a man’s true love is only for a woman” or an origin story for gender, it’s about explaining why humans love, because they desire to be whole. It’s about how everyone has a soulmate, a destined being, no matter your sex or the sex you prefer.
So, either Nico read a bullshit heteronormative version of the myth (possible, but not that likely, considering how he probably read it in the original greek due to demigod dyslexia), or Rick Riordan changed a wonderful myth about why humans love to give the gay kid yet another reason to angst, in which case, you suck, sir.
