For better quality, go to my Ao3 here.
This started out as an innocent joke that may or may not have involved chloroform. However, scenarios I create get dark enough as it is, and I thought maybe I shouldn't have Anubis stoop to you-know-who's level...
Basically every other Ennead character, haha! Instead I wanted to give a throw back to whenever young Anubis would find a sleeping Seth and take off his mask, play with his hair and just be sickeningly sweet. By now Anubis is, of course, fully grown, but the kind soul chibi pupper is still in there, just as much as the naughty dog is in him. They ARE both Anubis, after all; manifestations of his desires, and I dare say they share his core character.
Either way Anubis would - no doubt - be simping over Seth in every way, shape or form. And legend has it, he is still simping to this day, as we all should. This will get a continuation in the next chapter, very soon!
I know you have not Enneadposted since May so ignore this if you aren't interested in it anymore BUT if you've still been reading it I'd love to know your thoughts on it. Because lord knows I've got a COMPLICATED relationship with that manhwa
[tilts my head back] [takes a long drag out of my pencil like it's a cigarette] [blows out a puff of smoke] The Ennead, huh. Now that's a name that I haven't heard since, yeah, May. Boy howdy, friend, "COMPLICATED" doesn't even BEGIN to cover my feelings about this manwha. Also, tumblr ate my first reply to this so pardon if you see me repeating myself, I've lost track of what was & wasn't lost to the void.
Look, I'm gonna be honest, I only have myself to blame. I went into it knowing three things: 1) it's gonna be Horuset yaoi, 2) it's gonna likely bend the mythos in the name of said yaoi, and 3) it's some flavour of torture porn (friend's description) so I wasn't expecting like, faithfulness towards how the gods are usually depicted. I knew there'd be fanservice, I knew there'd be boys kissing, and I knew that there'd be angst.
"Alright, little manwha," I said, "I'm ready. Do your worst."
For the first number of chapters, I was jamming along. Set was being a badass chaotic piece of shit, Ra was a delightful reader insert if the thirst for drama and delighted cackling was anything to go by, and there were some actually interesting spins on the mythos being done (I especially LOVED the breath holding contest and the boat race!) Some character designs were… not up my alley, but some were really cool - I loved the idea of the headpieces/masks being connected to the gods' aspects and summonable/unsummonable at will, and I was fascinated by the mystery of why Anubis remained a small child despite his apparent age. The plot was plotting: Set is being a prick to his family. Why? Isis is scheming something and also had to flee to avoid Set's persecution. What's the story behind that? Munching popcorn and birthday cake like my life depended in it.
And theeeeen… Well, season 1 was over, and season 2… Look, it was fun at first to see Set knocked off his pedestal and forced to deal with the inconveniences of being powerless, and I really did enjoy the further scheming and political fuckery among the gods (ESPECIALLY the split Nephtys had going on and Isis struggling with wanting to distance herself from Osiris and yet being bound to him as his wife and co-conspirator, not to mention the fact that him being the father of her son was what allowed them to win power back from Set in the first place), but Set's misery got old FAST, especially once the plot started to meander a bit and throw in more gratuitous sexual assault, humiliation, force-femming, and overall reducing this once powerful and clever god to a bratty prettyboy whom everyone and their DOG are salivating over.
(Speaking of dogs, no comments on Anubis being "❤️🏳️🌈?????" about Set post-ascension. I loved him struggling with his fragmented memory, losing his sense of self and being a puppet in Os's hands, and I LOVED how utterly devastated Set was about it. No comment on Horus trying to make it into a fucking love triangle situation. "I don't like it when you're giving him attention >:(" kiddo shut the fuck up SET I AM SHOVING A MICROPHONE IN YOUR FACE, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO SEE YOUR SON WHO ISN'T EVEN YOURS BUT WHO YOU LOVE LIKE YOUR OWN SON REDUCED TO THIS????)
LEGIT I AM TOTALLY NOT THIS MANWHA'S TARGET AUDIENCE BECAUSE I AM SO MUCH MORE INVESTED IN NEPHTYS REGAINING HER MIND AND LOVE AND THE THREE OF THEM BEING REUNITED AND BACK TO BEING A FAMILY. FUCK OFF WITH THE FANSERVICE YAOI I DEMAND MORE CONTENT WITH SET AND HIS FAM, THE FAM HE GENUINELY LOVED YET MISTREATED AND SHOULD WORK TO MAKE AMENDS WITH RATHER THAN BEING CONTINUOUSLY PESTERED BY HIS CHILDISH ASS NEPHEW AND SOME FOREIGNER DUDE.
(Posi reads an 18+ BL manwha for the plot, except literally, more at 11.)
I'm gonna be real, I feel like this manwha straight up rubs against blasphemy in a lot of places - and not the fun kind of blasphemy - so hard that it's almost funny because it almost feels deliberate in its purposefulness to make Set miserable and YET IT ISN'T. Legit Isis herself couldn't have made better "Set is a loser" propaganda if she tried. I initially started saying this as a joke, but the more I think about it the more reasons I keep finding for why it's just so PAINFULLY disrespectful to Set as a deity. I mean, he's the god of chaos, the desert, in some translations a patron of foreigners - that last one especially is why some modern depictions show him as a white redhead - and associated with the colour red (red hair, his depictions as red-skinned totally stemming from him being seen as particularly masculine pale skin sunburnt lobster red from hanging out in the desert…) (okay that last one was a joke, I'm so sorry mate) which can symbolise blood, red sand, passion, violence, and, again, masculinity. Yeah, masculinity. So, seeing Set drawn as a long haired twink is one thing; seeing him be almost constantly humiliated, assaulted (Egypt's favourite bottom, apparently), treated as lesser, stripped of his powers, at the mercy of a FOREIGNER god, enslaved, shoved in female clothes MORE THAN ONCE, and even misgendered several times for comedic relief… I understand that it could be a metaphor for him not thinking that he's good enough, him not being traditionally masculine and yet still being deserving of his attributes, but… I dunno, gang, feels a little sus. And also not fun if you actually like mythos!Set.
Actually, while I remember: I feel like the foreigner fella whose name we still don't know is really mainly there for comedic relief and to introduce love triangle tension even though, like, we have clear canon evidence that Set fucking hates the guy and there are in fact panels showing him unintentionally whack Set with PTSD because some of his actions remind him of Osiris (the flower panel being the most blatant one). Like, sorry but how the hell does the narrative expect us to like him - even in a "lovable jerk we love to dunk on" way - while scattering those red flags all over the place? Hello?
Speaking of Osiris… Do I want to address the big green elephant in the room? The sexual assault which came out of absolutely nowhere and which I really don't see the bloody point of? Sigh... Do we really need to have him be abusive? Do we really need Set to be justified by trauma in killing him? I can get behind Osiris not being blameless, I can get behind him not wanting to be king and greeting death with relief, I can get behind him being imperfect so that Isis has reasons to be thankful for his absence but unable to distance herself from him because he'd drag her down with him if she tried…
(No comments about some of the absolutely nuanceless behaviour in the comments of the comic btw. Isis babes you're an antagonistic figure towards the boys but you're so intriguing and messy in a good way that those dumbass comments could never make me hate you.)
…buuuuuuuut it just felt unnecessary and, again, demeaning in multiple ways both to comic Set and his mythological counterpart. Do we really need to make Osiris the antagonist? Do we really need to have Sekhmet manipulate Set? Let the lad make his own mistakes and ruin his own life and work with his own two hands to fix it, for feck's sake.
SPEAKING OF UNNECESSARY ANTAGONISTS. Look, I'm regrettably not unfamiliar with shippers making the canon female love interest a huge bitch to facilitate their yaoi ship getting together, but reducing my girl Hathor to a ditzy, whiny, boy-crazy brat of a princess who's meant to be the goddess of love and fertility and one of the most powerful in the pantheon and yet is so out of touch that she doesn't even realise that her sweet handsome Horus doesn't give a single shit about her… OUT OF ALL THE WAYS THE COMIC COULD'VE HANDLED HER BEING HORUS'S WIFE IN THE MYTHS, IT WENT WITH THIS?! THE BLATANT DISRESPECT TOWARDS ONE OF MY FAVOURITE GODDESSES IN THE PANTHEON????
Look, I love Hathor. I love her and I love the myth of her and Sekhmet being one and the same. Back when I wove the Egyptian gods into a fanfic I wrote, I made her a powerful, dignified presence shackled to her creator's (Ra's) will as a metaphor for the desires of the heart being stifled by stupid, blind ambition. She still recalled the taste of blood on her tongue from her days as Sekhmet, the embodiment of Ra's fury with mankind, and it sickened her. It frightened her. She was the goddess of love, fertility, festivity and dance, giver of life - not bringer of death. She watched over love in all of its forms, be it romantic or platonic or familial, and was genuinely beloved both by her husband Horus and her in-laws Isis (who later shared some of her attributes and who literally broke the laws of life and death for love) and Osiris (who rules over the domain of death and died before he could hold his first and only son in his arms.)
Nothing longs for life more than death. No-one yearns for love more than a husband and father murdered before his time (oh look, another reason why I beef with Ennead's depiction of the lad!) Osiris has also been known to be associated with the grapevine, so of course he'd bond with his son's wife and see her as his own kid*; the reason why Egyptians used "brother/sister" as terms of endearment among lovers in New Kingdom poetry wasn't incest but a declaration that their connection made them the equivalent of so close that they might as well be bound by blood. "You've married my son and therefore you are my daughter. Come here, let's have a drink or two and you can tell me how my family is doing up there."
[*I like to joke that, since Anubis was apparently originally the kid of Ra instead of any of the GebNut sibs, the mixup with him being the son of either Set or Osiris is all 4 of them just scrambling to adopt him because his actual papa is never around unless as a corpse in the solar barque passing by. The fact that he may or may not be older than all of them appears irrelevant.]
I don't know, I think I just have vastly different interpretations of the pantheon than the writer. I love the entire GebNut disaster polycule as I like to call them & it ticks me off to see any of them shoved into an antagonistic role when they're all more complex than that…
…although ngl I loved Bastet as a comic relief spy. Heeeere kitty kitty kitty!
The handling of Anubis as the son of Nephtys and Osiris was at least interesting because it didn't shaft Nephtys as going to Os because she wanted a baby which Set, being often written as infertile (like the desert in which nothing could ever grow! Please ignore the plethora of colourful and hardy desert plants blooming all over the place!) couldn't give her. It was a weird choice, making it a trick of Os's, but it was new and showed us that Set loved Anubis so much that he didn't give a single shit about him not being his by blood. I loved the snippets of Nubs's happier childhood moments and, again, how absolutely and utterly FRANTIC Set was about getting Anubis back to his senses. "Pause the yaoi, I SAID PAUSE THE FUCKING YAOI, I NEED TO HELP MY KID." Bro wasn't always a good father (personal issues and fighty aspect and Sekhmet's manipulation go brrrr) but he tried his fucking best and I respect that. Legit the author made that storyline so compelling that it completely overrode the yaoi for me. Give Set his family back and let him see that they love him and that he's worthy of them! Let him fix what he broke!
Okay, many quarrels with the depictions of the gods aside, I fucking LOVED the Thoth and Ma'at subplot. I can't remember if they were actually married (I vaguely remember him having a wife called Seshat, but both of these might just be different interpretations or even two aspects of the same goddess. Ooohoohohoho gotta jump down THAT research rabbit hole sometime!) but it was so cute to see Thoth being a pathetic scrawny malewife to Ma'at and the two of them having an actually healthy relationship in contrast to everyone else. The scene where he and Geb have a convo about him apparently seducing Nut but in reality going to her to practice his game because he wanted to woo Ma'at was SO HILARIOUS. Also, I do appreciate that the comic mentioned the myth where he won her and Geb that extra time to have babies - he's a good lad, I love him a lot. Probably one of my favourite parts of the comic next to Ra being extRa. (Why the comic made the traditionally male deity a lass, I have no idea, and I so question the outfit a little bit, but I'm willing to overlook that because she's mad entertaining.)
Yeah, I see a lot of potential in this story and a lot fo genuinely interesting ideas, and by gods the art is LOVELY, but with the plot getting more meandery and fanservicey with each new thread introduced, I've decided that it's just not worth investing the attention in at the moment. I'm intrigued by the old gods plot and will prolly come back to it to binge the backlog just to see how this story ends, but for now I'm more entertained by other things.
(GODDAMN I NEED TO GET CAUGHT UP ON "GODSLAVE"! If you want a webcomic rec for Egyptian mythology, you've gotta read "Godslave." It's SO GOOD and fixes a lot of my gripes with "Ennead" - making Hathor both interesting and powerful just to name one.)
So yeah. Complicated indeed. Thanks for letting me ramble, anon! I've been meaning to get some of this off my chest. I think I just don't have the patience for your classic yaoi tropes and would rather have the story focus on resolving the existing plot instead of finding yet another excuse to have Set be r[edacted] by the closest random at hand. Like, even when he's with Horus in that temple and it's meant to be consensual, his wants and preferences are still ignored and he still complains and whines and is uncomfortable and not once does the narrative give him the small yet meaningful win that'd be having him be the one doing the fucking. Like, just one time. Not even for fanservice but for the narrative symbolism of him regaining a measure of dignity and agency. C'mon, please? Let the man have a single W. Just one. Give me back the fearsome god of the desert, I was SO HYPE when he got back his control over sand for a little bit!
GAH. SO MANY INTERESTING BITS, SIDELINED IN THE NAME OF PWP. I'm definitely not fujoshi enough for this shit, mate. There's creative retelling, and then there's straight up doing my boi dirty. Still, there IS potential. Still, there ARE plots which I really want to see resolved, and I'm SUPER INTO the worldbuilding, but... Yeah, Posi goes into an 18+ BL manwha and expects it to pay attention to the plot and keep the charactisation consistent. What happens next will shock absolutely nobody.
Edit: oh fuck I just glimpsed a post that the foreigner god might be Zeus because of some lightning powers fuckery. Didn't remember that! Inchresting.
Edit 2: [squints] wasn't... Wasn't Set also called the god of storms? Somewhere? Sometimes? FUCKING HELL CAN THIS COMIC STOP TAKING LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE SPECT OF HIS BEING AND TURNING IT AGAINST HIM????
new Ennead OC alert (unrelated to my Apep shenanigans)
lawyer reincarnates into Ennead, is a Seth stan, hijinks ensue
info under the cut
Everyone, meet Nialla Gallagher, or as Seth calls her because he can't pronounce either of these two words, Nylah. She's an American lawyer of Irish and Polish descent who dies in a car crash after a successful case.
Isekai is inevitable sometimes, though, so instead of the afterlife she should've expected (or the void), she finds herself in a magical version of Egypt specifically of Mojito's Ennead, thousands of years in the past, before even the pyramids, in a world where gods rule. Or, well, Seth fails at ruling because of his severe depression.
Nialla should have hid. Booked it out of Egypt, or at least found a temple of Isis to take her in, safely away. Instead, like an idiot with a death wish (or a fan of the work who already died once therefore her view on death is irreparably skewed) she goes straight to Seth instead. Surprise at the color of her hair buys her enough time to bullshit her way into Seth's service, from where she can sink her claws into the plot and try to steer it in the direction more favorable for her favorite character, the currently-super-depressed and deeply traumatized Pharaoh.
So she becomes someone he can rely on, someone who reins in the worst of his impulses and who's there to be the shoulder to cry on, and the voice of reason, and the bridge between Seth and at least Anubis while they work together to undo Isis curse.
And then, when Isis and Horus come and the court of Ennead goes to session, all Nylah can do is bare her death and unleash the skills she never forgot and wrath she honed over the years, and make nothing go their way.
(And maybe seduce Sekhmet while she's at it. She always had a fondness for evil women.)
Nylah and her outfits outfits made in Jewel of the Nile meiker (most picked out by Seth because Nialla's sense of Egyptian fashion is nonexistent and she subconsciously tries to put them in modern shapes):
She was 33 when she died, and though For Some Reason (wink) she doesn't age anymore, she does look older than most of the gods.
People often (wrongly) assume that her and Seth are a thing. While she's a Seth stan, she's also a lesbian.
Her ultimate goal is to have Osiris' soul disintegrated and permanently kill him, and her secondary goal is to keep Horus off Seth, especially when Seth is still vulnerable.
Oh, you know, when the fam is having a good time recreating historic paintings with the plot of Ennead.
I'm starting to think I can't take anything seriously.
The original painting is Dante And Virgil In Hell. It just gives such Ennead vibes, I mean can you see why I had to draw this one?
ENNEAD SPOILERS:
I want to say... when you've been waiting for Anubis to come back after 15+ chapters and you get this lmao - Seth protect your ovaries.
We knew this was coming, had time to brace but... I'm not ready. Anubis has his grandma's beauty and his father's horniness orz
For me Ennead can end right here. Anubis and Seth can run away together & be happy. Nothing more needs to happen. Who wants to join me in my happy delulu land?
Also, Seth is always beautiful. orz How does he do it? (Fingers crossed they don't paint Anubis to be a villain)
