To celebrate the 1 year anniversary of my Ares Blog I decided to ask myself a question...why do I or should I care about Ares?
Because the obvious answers of "Because it's important to have accurate portrayals of classic characters?" or "Because every time we portray Ares as a hyper macho violent berserker that wants to plunge the world into war we're unintentionally insulting Greece for worshipping as a Primary Olympian" or even "Because Greece as a country still exists and they're Hellenistic Pagans that worship him today and wouldn't appreciate it." Because I am neither a classicist, scholar of ancient Greece, or even a Hellenistic Neo-Pagan and those answers don't apply to me so I still ask myself why...
Then I re-read the myth of Ares where he responded to his daughter being assaulted by a son of Poseidon by viciously murdering him (in ways that are implied to be anything but painless and pretty) and getting put on trial for his actions, or remembering the myth where Ares rescued Thanatos from Sisyphus, a man who has outsmarted and got the better of 3 Gods, by (again implied) going to where Thanatos was last sent too, beating the shit out of Sisyphus, rescuing him, and taking Thanatos and Sisyphus directly to Hades for the appropriate punishment, and the myth where Ares arrives to visit Thrace, the place where he was born and nursed in, in his youth and runs into Enyalios who decides to make a mockery of the Prince of Olympus and Hospitality by refusing to host Ares because he deemed him weaker than him in the art of War and Ares, after giving him a chance to correct his attitude and tone, challenged him to a duel and killed him and took his name as a title, the land of Thrace as his Kingdom, and Enyalios's mother Enyo as his sister/lover/battle companion (you guessed it, implied).
And then I see how his character in directly inspires characters like Doom Slayer, Kratos, the Hulk, Asura, and Wolverine, i.e. angry boys who respond to threats via being direct and overwhelming.
The reason why I like Ares is...because he's direct when dealing with being wronged and is the OG proverbial 'Knot Cutter' who solves his problems in simple ways rather than the convoluted ways his family usually prefers to solve problems. He faces his problems head on, regardless of the consequences (for better or worse), and he's unapologetic about it. And in a world, both in the myths and IRL, where a lot of bad faith actors try to game the system by talking and blustering, sometimes the problem just needs to be solved by being direct.
And I like that and can resonate with that in a character and find it frustrating when his pattern of direct problem solving is taken as mindless rage that needs to be sent into the corner by big sis Athena or whatever hero she's giving her blessing (which happens...a lot in modern depictions ever since Wonder Woman). It doesn't always work, as the myths of him losing can attest, but it's something we could use a lot more off.
To summarize, I don't like Ares just because he's misunderstood or because he's secretly this noble paragon of war, I like him because he represents that sometimes the best response to words, contracts, and rules failing is direct force and one thing most people can agree on is Ares, is the God of Direct Force.
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