In my dream there's some part of pjo that was maybe interesting in exploring Annabeth (and other children of athena) as these sort of liminal beings. Liminality in the anthropological sense. Of the "in-between" "threshold" kind.
Tricksters show in up in many different forms of myth and folklore. Coyote, Loki, Anansi, Reynard maybe even Koshchei (imo.) Tricksters basically liminal by definition, most of the time. Liminality is to stand upon a threshold, to be neither one thing nor the other, between order and chaos and life and death, that sort of thing. They're In-Between. Threshold beings. They cross boundaries and violate social and natural norms, break rules and often remake them in a new way. They possess secret knowledge. They often have fluid forms or gender.
Hermes is the most typical trickster of greek gods, especially his psychopomp role and basically embodying 'transit' in the same sense other liminal spaces (airports, hotels, train stations) do, places of transition, in-between places.
But I think Athena has many trickster aspects herself, existing at an intersection of a lot of opposing concepts, transgressive in the way she crosses or collapses various boundaries.
She's an extremely androgynous figure, given aspects of traditional femininity (WEAVING!, domestic craft, virginity/chastity) and masculinity (civic invention, warfare/depictions in male armor, patron of heroes (male), weirdly enough virginity again, since remaining unmarried exempts her from aspects of fertility, family, matrimony, etc.)
Male tricksters often take on feminine aspects, usually resulting in the act of creation (Loki as the mare), while Athena takes on masculine aspects, and forgoes (pro)creation.
She regularly shifts guises and appearance when she appears to heroes, very connected to very trickstery heroes such as Prometheus and Odysseus.
In some origins, she's truly motherless and is born in a way that transgresses the natural order. In others, she's Zeus's offspring with Metis (a shapeshifter!), whose aspect/name is also the word for 'cunning intelligence,' a strong trickster trait that Athena inherits (and is still born in the same order-violating way.)
She's a virgin goddess with a child (Erichthonius) who also is born from something other than womb (the earth in this case)
Athena, who has no mother, casts the tie-breaking vote to acquit Orestes of matricide, upending and rewriting the rules re: kin-slaying and the Furies. And also invents trials.
If Ares and Athena are male and female deities of warfare, I'd say Athena and Hermes are male and female trickster deities.
In PJO, demigods are already sort of liminal beings by nature of existing. Half-mortal and half-divine, never belonging fully to either world, straddling the land of the in-between. For Athena's kids, you add in the aspect of being conceived sexlessly, without kind of womb whatsoever (even the kind Erichthonius got), through thought alone. Athena, who usually has no mother herself, is both their mother and not-mother? Neither mother nor child were "born", traditional kinship and blood ties aren't really present, what it means to be "born" is completely thrown for a loop with Athena and all her kids. (please note this is about MYTH and specific thought around kinship and birth, this isn't a comment on motherhood in real life which takes a bunch of forms. don't. don't be weird about it. you know that birth alone is not how motherhood works in real life.) They're doubly strange even as demigods, strange in both realms.
I know it's PJ-O, it's not a series where Annabeth is the main character. I get it! But I can't help but think it would have been nice to have framed her through this. Apart from her literal existence, Annabeth has a lot to work with when it comes to inheriting that "boundary-crossing".
Her love of architecture is about literally reshaping aspects of her world (like Olympus) (I'd have loved this to have been a 'redefining divine/mortal boundaries' thing)
She somewhat has a role as a possessor of secret knowledge: knows about the Big Prophecy, usually providing general demigod information to Percy (and the reader), holding information and being super cagey about stuff in a way that definitely has to make Percy feel like he's hearing the tell-tale sound of a dog trying really hard to chew quietly in another room.
When it suits her, she has no problem with transgressive action: breaking rules, mouthing off to authority figures, generally being akin to an feral undomesticated cat constantly asking Chiron and friends "why" and then probably going "that's dumb" in response.
She crosses pantheon boundaries more than any other character, especially with her involvement with Magnus and the sort of implication that she has some ties through her mortal side to the Norse pantheon.
Any and all travels to and from the underworld, katabasis and anabasis, inherently is a "boundary-crossing" act
There's even being caught between loyalties, between her rational thought process and the irrational, but deeply necessary, truth of the heart.
I think her obsession with permanence would have been really interesting from this angle, a person who lives on threshold. It's already coming from her perpetually transitory, unstable existence, the way she's consistently unmoored and rootless. Adding the lens of the inherently "in-between" nature of demigods and Athena's children would have been interesting.
I can obviously make this a reading of the text as it, but I would have liked it to have been sort of the point, textually speaking. I'd have liked to have seen this more for Annabeth and her half-sibs. And more of the strategies of misdirection, more of the cunning persuasion and manipulation, more disrupting systems through cleverness. Anyway. I feel like this post got away from me. I had some of this already mapped out for an entirely too complicated idea I want to write. I should go do that one day.
my reading addon is waiting approval for firefox and chrome im so nervous. please approve my addon i think it could help at least one other person as much as it's helped me...
it's an accessibility tool i made for myself because i needed it, which basically lets you focus on one sentence at a time as you read large blocks of texts (books, articles, etc.). it offers different highlight styles, some of which use gradients to help guide your eyes from the start of the sentence until the end. you can move forward and back pressing the buttons or using ALT + left and right arrow keys
if you use it and you find it helpful please tell me about it so i can have the motivation to keep improving it. i love knowing people use my tools
I think it's a shame that "Oedipus complex" refers to fucking your mom instead of the actual point of his story, fulfilling your destiny through your attempts to avoid it. It just so happens his destiny was to fuck his mom
“Ugh this prominent women in the Lesbian movement turned out to be a bisexual” “ugh this famous lesbian transitioned into a man” “ugh this queer romance writer turns out to be ace” “ugh this cis feminist author ended up being nonbinary” “ugh this writer on masculinity transitioned into a woman”
Oh no! We might have to recognize liberation as an interconnected intersectional struggle! Ahhh!!! >.<
Labubus are blind bags but they're also blind bags with some of the most insane dark patterns stacked on top. The online store for them has a thing where they tell you what you got the second you order it online so that you can immediately try again if you didn't get the thing you wanted.
There's also a shake feature that is designed to encourage you to buy more than one by narrowing down the possibility space on a crate of options so that if you're hunting a specific model you can verify that it's guaranteed to be in one of these three IF you buy all three right now!!!!!
There was a knock at the door. It should not be possible for a knock to sound surreptitious, yet this knock achieved it. It had harmonics. They told the hindbrain: the person knocking will, if no one eventually answers, open the door anyway and sidle in, whereupon he will certainly nick any smokes that are lying around, read any correspondence that catches his eye, open a few drawers, take a nip out of such bottles of alcohol as are discovered, but stop short of major crime because he is not criminal in the sense of making a moral decision but in the sense that a weasel is evil--it is built into his very shape. It was a knock with a lot to say for itself.
“[kink] is bad because [thing the kink is based on] is bad” is such a funny take. we’re acting. you hate theater. you’re standing up in the audience and mansplaining to lady macbeth that killing people is wrong
i'm so glad goncharov happened when it did, right before prolific public use of AI. that was pure honest gaslighting straight from the heart. real human whimsicality and trickery thru blood sweat and tears. we were a family. and we all gonched, together. you cant replicate that with any machine.
Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.
The McDonald’s french fry is unbelievable. When you bite into it, you think: It’s so tasty, it can’t be real. As soon as it gets cold, it turns to lard and flubble. I mean, have you ever tried to eat a McDonald’s french fry that’s gone cold? That’s one of the circles of hell. The gulf between the warm, fresh, lightly salted McDonald’s french fry and the cold McDonald’s french fry is as great a gulf as any I know. - Viggo Mortensen, Esquire magazine (x)
"Why didn't they just communicate?? They're so stupid!" Have you considered that communicating with someone you love and value and don't want to hurt is scary and that vulnerability takes practice and that perfect characters with perfect words make the most boring stories of all
