#mythblog

[hotelsongs]

that last question was ridiculous. unless you want to answer it. otherwise: top five myths.

:D i did though! as for myths:

helen of troy, specifically as a myth (that is, transcendent of any one given text. cos the texts suck. they suuuuuck.)

inanna/ereshkigal. i love inanna myths, i love her conning enki, her releasing the bull of heaven to Ruin Everything, and this is my favorite of them. because katabasis is my Whole Shit, or in any case A Majority Of My Mythically Archetypal Shit, and this is about sister-goddesses, it’s just about the dueling girls. and i realised last year in my dante seminar that women are rulers of the underworld all the time but i’ve sensed if only from what i’ve read that they’re pilgrims much more rarely, usually they come to stay where men get the rite of passage through, and in this one there’s both and they’re SISTERS and i WANT PEOPLE RETELLING THIS WAY MORE OFTEN THAN I GET, i love persephone as much as the next chick (and no tumblr has not exhausted that for me and i have specific thoughts about its popularity as A Story For And About Teen Girls so i’m fine with its zeitgeist status and people being weird internet snobby about it gets up my back) but godalmighty this is my favorite katabasis and i want it in every direction. period, modernised, timeless. i vaguely want to write it as a short story about The Worst Thanksgiving Ever (In The Underworld, Which Is Not Great For Cooking Turkey, And Your Sister Is Always Super Mean Even Though You’ve Taken Such A Long Trip To Get Here).

mélusine, who is SNAKES. always and forever with the ambitious snake women falling in love, earnestly, but not enough to change the essential snakeness of them.

isis and osiris, beautiful grisly marriage trial that gets extra-forever stapled into my heart having looked at the mural on the ceiling of the appartamento borgia

i’d forgotten how much i love the creation myth of izanami/izanagi until natsuo kirino came out with the goddess chronicle. which i haven’t even read yet! i will! but i just get so hyped when i go past it in the bookstore like YEAH BABE HAVEN’T REVISITED YOU IN A DAMN AGE. i SAID katabasis was my main thing.

also any version of galatea-with-agency ok

[hotelsongs]

while i'm on this week's bastardized iliad kick—there this iliad-lite kid's trojan war "novelization" in one of my elementary school classrooms, which was mostly straightforward except for the part where agamemnon and achilles's first spat was over a captured priestess's daughter called cressida. (whose smoky voice was lovingly and specifically described like the author was writing with 'to have and to have not' on in the background.) achilles was like "i want CRESSIDA" and agamemnon was like "she's mine but fine give me briseis" and then the whole briseis/achilles-sulks-in-a-tent actual canon bit kicked in AND THEN LATER when the gods are getting more involved with petty affairs and more stressed out about their involvement in the war cupid stuck an arrow in her heart re. diomedes and she had this whole romantic crisis of, like, 'this is poison, i hate this, but i'm stuck with all these poisonous sexy romantic feelings now GUESS I GOTTA GO FUCK DIOMEDES AND MAKE EVERYONE FURIOUS, UGHHHHHHHHH'. and it was a weird good gods'-choice/her-forward-motion/toxic-fate ruinous sexstorm of which she was the central agent and i was obviously super into her pov and went looking for stories about her but mysteriously didn't find her in any other retold trojan war stories what the heck

and like i didn't have a kids' chaucer or a kids' complete works, but many many years later i'd be like "ok shakespeare thank u for writing about my neglected fav babe wait who the frick is troilus"

[hotelsongs]

a reliable source of energy, just ask agave

[hotelsongs]

favorite immoral/monster lady and reasons (pls)

immoral lady, all my ladies are immoral, so: immoral monster lady, as in creature-woman (disqualifying creation-woman, that's caprica six), let's go with archetypal creature-woman, is the lamia. i love the lamia, and also melusine, for sort of the same reason, which is that they're hungry snake women with the capacity for love—real love—but love that does not consume them, and when their intrinsic nature is put up against that capacity for love they choose themselves. they are ecstatic serpent sybarite women with souls they can contain; they are monster women and selfish women and their love is all the more powerful a weapon for not being a lie. i love the image of the seductress who believes her own seductions for as long as they last—and maybe only that long, but she believes in them in their time. also lamia eats babies. what is not to love.

and as for non-archetypal, it's tallula, it's tallula demetriou, it's tallula demetriou for the same logic, which is that tallula demetriou is big enough to be monster and woman and evil and loving and encompassing of a thousand different stories in a thousand different genres all in the same time. (m'friend maggie talked about the idea of werewolf magdalene—it came up—and i was like, isn't that tallula, and it was, but that's ON TOP of being monster mary, like deliberate textual monster-mary, and also the scion of her monstrosity and the god of her own story and and and—she's everything, and i mean that emotionally, in a To Me way, and also textually the point is that she contains everything and has the capacity to be the heroine of every story projected onto her without being constrained by the genre of the moment, and she is all things that make a woman monstrous, as well as an actual person-eating monster, and yet she is not damned. and that is the heart of every woman-monster monster-woman i love, that they are monsters who defy damnation, they don't have the goddamn time for guilt or shrinkage, their human is bigger than that and their monster is too.)

[hotelsongs]

She can feel him love her, his love soaking through his fingertips with every brush of the keys. Or maybe he’s loving the music, but they feel unerringly alike.

11K. Eurydice/Orpheus (& Eurydice/Persephone). Prohibition!AU.

[hotelsongs]

oh have you read nobody's princess? (scathing thoughts, i would love to hear them.)

God, no, I’ve just seen it around, and the fact that Helen Of Troy Really Liked To Shoot Arrows The Whole Time And Gets A Happy Ending By Becoming A Pirate! :D! is a YA treatment makes me want to clock people.

Of all the figures on whom to pull this insidious, reductive, fauxminist, dated, self-hating bullshit on, there is something about pulling it on Helen that is extra poisonous to me. Helen: definitionally The Woman at the heart of the wholly male war, the thing that makes the war about explicitly masculine glory, a paragon instead of a person but a paragon of femininity, of destructive feminine godhead. Her power comes from her femininity, her power is her beauty first, her matrilineal queenship second, and even when those powers are coded as bad things, they’re still forces of fucking nature. To undercut them by saying “no, she wants to be BOYISH! all this gross girliness is FORCED UPON HER!” is to strip her of her power; it’s to give her a voice only to decry everything she represents in the metatext.

Fuck that. Helen—of Sparta, of Troy, of Olympus—is power in a body, power constrained to the language of the body to maximum impact. As icon, even before we get into the question (a worthy question!) of what her voice actually is, she is unbelievable amounts power constrained by the joint rules both of being mortal and being female. Rejecting her because she’s a damaging model of womanhood misses the point, and redefining her as a model for why Femininity is bad shits on it.

Good day.

[hotelsongs]

Once upon a time in Asgard, the goddess Freya had two suitors, two handsome brothers to claim her hand. She had chosen Balder as her immortal mate. Enraged and jealous, Loki vowed revenge; and on the eve of their wedding, his poison-tipped arrow met its mark.

i

that's not how

that's now how you

ANYTHING?????????

[hotelsongs]

you should talk about your favorite ladies from the classical world! i know you don't love any of them as much as lucrezia or even the medieval ladies you talk about, but you love helen, right? any other women, whether real or mythological, that you really love?

please, do so! and ha, that statement about not loving them as much as my medieval ladies is a lie. i am perhaps not as immersed in the history as thoroughly as i would like, so while i love empress theodora and aspasia and agrippina major and julia drusilla and hypatia and CLODIA METELLI OMG, i can't unpack the intricacies of the histories as well as i would like (i mean, i can talk about no one in history the way i can talk about lucrezia, but). talking about mythic ladies is easier; i grew up on the pantheon. so helen, yes, and clytemnestra and hecuba and medea and circe and calypso and phaedra and agave and eurydice (sarah ruhl problems with that); among the goddesses, aphrodite and hera and persephone. basically, sorceresses and wantons, as per.

clodia metelli for real, though. someday i may need to learn latin a) to become a worthwhile medievalist but b) to read catullus in the original.