You know what? I will actually make my post about this problem (and even talk about some misogynistic implications! yeepee!)
It all started with the recent depiction of Hestia in the show "Blood of Zeus". Now... I did not watch the second season of Blood of Zeus, because the first season already gave me enough reasons to dislike the show and rank it among the bad depictions of Greek mythology. But I couldn't escape the massive success and presence of season 2 on Youtube, so I did watch some of the scenes of "Hestia doing battled" and throwing fire-balls and fire-tornadoes at people.
I do not take offense to that. Why? Because this fits the show's aesthetic and goal. As much as I dislike this, the show is about doing huge battles and being an action-piece filled with gore, taking cues from things like God of War, and depicting the gods as violent and destructive and warriors always fighting and killing people. So having Hestia weaponize her fire was expected from this show - I would have been surprised she didn't do it.
HOWEVER! What I take offense to is how people reacted to this. I saw the flood of comments which were basically "Yas girl, show them queen, burn them to a crisp, show you're the oldest and most powerful!". Some even said "This is the best depiction of Hestia alongside Riordan's". And to THAT I take offense. Now I know there is a symbolic plotline about Hestia protecting the omphalos, and honestly this sounds cool and good, but I am not speaking about it. I am speaking about Hestia you know, fighting monsters and demons by unleashing winds and waves of fire on them.
This isn't what the Greek goddess Hestia is about. She is not a fighter, she is not a warrior, she is not a power of destruction or war, she literaly is the most passive and peaceful entity you can find in Greek mythology. And in this light, Riordan's depiction of Hestia in his novel "The Last Olympian" is far superior because Riordan gets what makes Hestia who she is, and he prepares the story to show her in the role she fulfills: a woman sitting by a fire, welcoming people, feeding them, talking to them, guarding and staying awake and behind, and just... keeping the last fort, so to speak. And by doing so proving herself immensely cool and powerful and important. (That's another tip for writers out there: if you are confronted with a conflict of character versus plot... you know you are supposed to sometimes tailor the plot specifically to allow the character to shine as they were intended to be, and you are not forced to modify a character to fit your plot? Don't want to depict Hestia as a warrior deity because she was not that? Simple: don't show her being directly in battle or in need of defending herself. Write about something else instead).
I will admit that my teenage-self would have loved to see Hestia throwing fireballs - because that's the edgy stuff teenagers love (and I guess this is why "Blood of Zeus" works so much, it was literaly designed for your edgy teens). But I am an adult now and I know better. And I have also enough experience to see that people wishing and craving for a fireball-throwing Hestia is symptomatic of something much wider.
This wider thing being: modern audiences have a very hard time understanding that you can have immensely powerful characters who are mighty without being violent, agressive and hostile. I will be biased because events in my life and the real world are revealing we are living in an hyper-violent time, but this indeed led me to think about this topic.
Hestia is a manifestation of this idea that "might and importance does not mean violence". But there are many, many others, and to take a similar example I will dig up a Tolkien example I adore. Melian, from the Silmarillion. People got into a whole drama when "The Rings of Power" was released because of Galadriel's depiction, and I am NOT getting into that. But Melian and Morgoth's fight is linked, because it was Tolkien's precursor to Galadriel's battle against Sauron. So, what about Melian? She is a demigoddess among mortals, a divine spirit more powerful than the magic users we are knowing in the Tolkien universe (more powerful than Gandalf or Saruman), and one of the main ennemies of Morgoth himself, the OG Dark Lord and the baddest of the big bads. She is one of the mightiest entities to have walked Middle-Earth outside of the Valar themselves, and how does it manifests itself?
By the Girdle of Melian. A magical protection of her land. But does this magic wall manifests as spikes of fire? Are trespassers killing by a thunderbolt? Not at all. You can't even see the Girdle. Melian's magic simply... protects her land, and shields it from the eyes of evil. It makes intruders confused and lost and it leads them astray, without actually harming them. And Melian repels all the evil spells and dark curses and malevolent forces. And that's it. Simple, invisible, passive - and yet one of the most powerful enchantments and impressive feats of magic of Middle-Earth, able to keep Morgoth himself at bay.
This later would earn Tolkien's writing some criticism, as Tolkien was very fond of this idea of "passive power" for women (outside of his two famous "active" women, Eowyn and Luthien), and it fed into the unfortunate fantasy stereotype of "women are passive, men are active" (itself a manifestation of the underlyng misogyny among 20th century fantasy literature as a whole). But this is a good manifestation of how Tolkien imitated and took inspiration from old mythologies and legends - where this idea of "passive power" was VERY prevalent and important.
Hestia and Melian are just two examples I took out of my hat, but there are many many more, and they all rely in one principle: you have great and mighty powers that make some characters (or places, or items) dreaded by villains and beloved by the good people ; you have these forces that repel all evil and that are to be considered sacred and to be protected ; you have these ancient and immensely powerful entities that outrank everybody... and yet who never lift a hand against someone else, and who don't unleash floods or storms onto people, and who never even threatened to harm anybody. Because their very power relies on other principles, because they are a form of sacred power in what it has of... essential I'll say. This specific motif is VERY prevalent among Christian legends (at least European Catholic flavors) because it was heavily used when depicting saints and angels. One of the recurring motif of hagiography (the life of the saints and the legends surrounding them) is how the saint does not threaten those that wish to put them to death, never lift a finger against those that try to harm them - but by the very power of their sacredness, love/wisdom/goodness, weapons break against them or cannot reach them, and those that wish to destroy them are rendered powerless. In a wider scope it is also reflected in other Christian-derived myths like the vampire myth: before people decided to "visualize" the vampire's weakness to sacredness by having crosses or churches burn the vampire alive, it was just... the vampire literaly couldn't enter the church, and just fled away, like some mental compulsion, before the cross.
It is a concept and idea of the "sacred" and of the "sacred power" (so to speak) that existed since the Ancient Greeks to modern Catholics, and that heavily fueled and fed our fiction from old fairytales to modern fantasy novels. And it is something that is being completely lost as today power means: fighting, hitting, beating up, unleashing storms and chaos, and threatening to break every single finger of the people who are angry at you. It is even more annoying because we are not speaking about real life here. We are talking about MAGIC and about FANTASY and so EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
And I promised you more misogyny well here it is... I noticed something recently and that might be just me extrapoling things, but while this whole "passive power" idea has been heavily criticized for female characters (in a very right way, as one cannot deny passive women in fantasy was indeed a big problem) and is now fully rejected, I can't help but notice that when it comes to male characters suddenly it is praised and glorified, especially as how it depicts men "not being violents for once". And... I can't help but think, cynical little mind that I am, that maybe by trying to flee one form of misogyny we enter another one, because the implicit of "passive power" being good for men but laughable for women, is that... women need to be active and violent and brutalizing to prove themselves, while men do not have to. The sort of inherent sacredness and respect people once gave to women has now passed onto men - because men do not need to "prove" they're strong anymore, everybody is supposed to know this - while women, if they try to just be a power in themselves and by themselves, get ridiculed because "If someone comes with a mace, they won't be able to defend themselves". Almost as if people can't take seriously anymore the idea that you just have women so powerful they don't even need to fight to defeat you.
I don't know, here I am truly rambling around, and this is a Charybdis and Scylla scenario because you literaly have problems whether you depict women as active or passive, since both sides are hated by different people and both bear their inherent biases and stereotypes.
But conclusion: I wish when it comes to power and magic and gods we had more depictions of passive and non-violent forces. I am tired enough of the violence in the real-world I don't need even more added onto my screen in an unecessary way. If I want to see a goddess burn everything to the ground, I go look for Pele, or Sekhmet. I don't look for Hestia.
