Helen retellings part 13
"This is the war from inside the body everyone blamed for it. And it is the story of the husband who crossed the sea to kill me, and what happened when he finally stood in front of the woman instead of the symbol.
For readers of Lore Olympus, Madeline Miller, and morally-grey, villain-era Greek retellings, the women of the Trojan War and the Odyssey in their own voices
...
• The war reframed from the only seat no poet ever gave her: her own."
This book WILL be worse than what you're fearing
Chapter 3: Queen of a Country That Owns Me
The trend of pretendind Helen was opressed is tiring
"But the taking was not the beginning. The beginning is earlier, and it is the part everyone skips. They start at the ships, or at the wall, or at the bed I am supposed to have ruined a continent to lie in.
I grew up in a hall of bronze and old stone with my sister, and I will tell you about her, because she is the only one in this whole story who is the same blood and the same wound as me, and she is the one nobody warns you about."
This books are just a constant "no poet or man™️ ever talked about this" to the point you want to scream at the protagonist
"and they were the kind of brothers a girl in a hall like mine learns to feel grateful for, which is to say they would burn a city to get a sister back and never think to ask the sister whether she would rather they had taught her to ride out of trouble herself."
You were 14 years old, don't pretend you had ANY idea how to do it 😑
"The world that blamed me never noticed they were missing. A woman's brothers are only remembered as long as they are useful to her story,"
Castor and Pollux's death was noticed so much that it was used to explain a constelation
They were useful during the Argonauts travels and that had nothing to do with you
"And when I was taken, the wrong done was a wrong done to the men who owned me, and the repair was to them,
I have never told that part before. The taking. The poets cut it, because it muddies their water."
Basically every poet who wrote about that event agrees that Theseus was the villain
"And then my father announced his choice, and gave me to Menelaus.
I had barely spoken to him. Set thst down somewhere, since the record is the thing I am here to fix. The man I was given to, the man I would be queen beside for years, I had exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences with across all those days of feasting, and most of those were the small courtesies you trade with a guest at your father's table.
He was not cruel and he was not rough and he did not take anything that the contract had not already given him, which I have learned is a thing women are supposed to be grateful for and which I will not, on princible, be grateful for,"
"and not once, not on that night and not in the years that followed it, did the man I had been awarded to ask me a single question about what I wanted.
I lay awake after, in the dark of my marriage, a wife at sixteen(!!!) and a stranger to the man breathing beside me,
Menelaus
I have killed men for less than the look she gave me on our wedding night,"
So Menelaus is violent and he never bothered to have a personal talk with his child bride... 🤦♂️
"I felt everything, and I had been taught no way to show any of it that did not look like ownership.
So I hid it. I hid it so well that I hid it from her fors years. I hid it so well that I am only now, telling this to no one, finding out it was there.
She thinks I do not see her."
Because you don't. Having sex with a 16 years old doesn't mean you know her as a person
My honest feeling
Another book with ai generated image on the cover
The plot is fiding oc descendants of Helen
This cover could be ai
The plot is that Helen reincarnated into an american woman from Colorado 😑
Whatever
"From her divine birth, Helen's radiance outshines all others, drawing the attention of gods and mortals alike."
Not really? Prior to the Trojan War Helen barely interacted with deities
The summary is a mess and for some reason there's no Chapter 2
I honestly don't know if she was described as kind to the point everyone was enchanted
"To avert this impending storm, King Tyndareus devised a solution that would bind the suitors in a solemn oath - a pact forged in honor and duty."
So the isn't the suggestion of Odysseus here
Also wtf is Achilles doing here? He was a child at this point
@when-the-pawnn @polypharmakoss
